This Thursday at Change, Rob Nathan will be presenting on his work on Portable Ultrasound.
According to the UN Africa and the Millennium Development Goals 2007 “Maternal health remains a regional and global scandal, with the odds that a sub-Saharan African woman will die from complications of pregnancy and childbirth during her life at 1 in 16 compared with 1 in 3,800 in the developed world.”
We have begun a pilot project in Uganda to teach midwives to perform limited obstetrical ultrasound to identify potential birth complications. Women with those conditions will be encouraged to deliver in a facility equipped to perform cesarean section, rather than at a lower level health facility or in the home. Midwives will use off the shelf portable ultrasound equipment donated by GE. We have begun to work with Computing and Engineering and HCDE to develop equipment that is more appropriate for rural developing country environments: durable, cheap, simple, able to run off the electrical grid. We hope to incorporate ODK into this equipment.
What: Rob Nathan on Portable Ultrasound When: Thursday, November 5 at Noon Where: UW, Paul Allen Center, Room 403
This Thursday at Change, we will be trying something special for CSE Affiliates Day. We will be hosting the “Technology for Under-Served Regions” session. Please note the change in time and place.
11:40-11:45: Introduction and Overview, Carl Hartung 11:45-12:00: Digital Study Hall Evaluation Study, Amit Saxena 12:00-12:15: Open Data Kit, Carl Hartung 12:15-12:30: Building a Grassroots Transportation Information System, Ruth Anderson
Open Data Kit (ODK) is an open-source mobile data collection toolkit for the citizen science, public health, and environmental monitoring.
ODK developers (and Change members), Yaw Anokwa and Carl Hartung have just released ODK Collect v1.1, an Android client which renders a form, survey, or algorithm into prompts that support complex logic, input constraints, repeating questions, and multiple languages.
Some of the new features include barcode scanning, image/audio/video capture and playback, editing of saved forms, and device metadata (phone number, IMEI, IMSI) support.
This Thursday at Change, Amit Saxena will be presenting on his work with Digital StudyHall.
The Digital StudyHall (DSH) project aims to improve education for students in rural and slum schools in India. The researchers video record classes taught by experienced teachers, distribute these videos over “Postmannet” (effected by DVDs sent in the postal system), collect them in a large distributed database, and distribute them on DVDs to poor rural and slum schools. Education experts train local teachers to mediate the video lessons for use in their teaching. For more details, please see: http://dsh.cs.washington.edu/
The University of Washington and the StudyHall Educational Foundation are currently undertaking a two year mixed methods study of Digital StudyHall in 11 village schools in the the Chinhat Development Block, Lucknow, India. The study is supported by the National Science Foundation. In the presentation, I will share our preliminary analysis of the teaching and learning outcomes as well as the implementation of the DSH system in these schools.
What: Amit Saxena on Digital StudyHall When: Thursday, October 22 at Noon Where: UW, Paul Allen Center, Room 403
This Thursday at Change, Justin Steventon will be presenting on his exciting work with CyberTracker.
Climate change, pollution, habitat destruction and loss of biodiversity may have serious impacts on human welfare. To anticipate and prevent negative impacts will require ongoing long-term monitoring of all aspects of the environment.
Our vision is to enable people to be part of a worldwide environmental monitoring network. Our mission is to help you improve environmental monitoring by increasing the efficiency of data gathering and to improve observer reliability.
CyberTracker is a software application which allows illiterate and low-literate people to capture rich data about their environment.
What: Justin Steventon on CyberTracker When: Thursday, October 15 at Noon Where: UW, Paul Allen Center, Room 403
This Tuesday at the CSE Colloqium, Professor Gaetano Borriello will be presenting Open Data Kit, work he did while on sabbatical at Google.
Open Data Kit (ODK) is an open-source mobile data collection toolkit for the citizen science, public health, and environmental monitoring communities. These groups share the fact that they all have limited resources and tend to be behind the technology curve. ODK’s goals are three-fold:
(1) make tools highly modular and customizable so that they can be easily composed and/or specialized into appropriate arrangements for the task at hand;
(2) exploit open interfaces and standards so that solutions are not “silo-ed” into monolithic enterprise-level packages that are difficult to understand and maintain; and
(3) get these communities to take advantage of evolving technologies including powerful mobile clients (e.g., Android), flexible and scalable server infrastructure (e.g., AppEngine) so as to reach a wider base of developers and avoid early obsolescence.
In this talk, Borriello will describe the current status and research and development plans. For those who cannot make it, the talk will live streamed and recorded.
In the past few days, a few interesting ICTD papers have been published that I wanted to share.
The first set comes from the Information Technologies & International Development (ITID), an interdisciplinary open-access journal that focuses on the intersection of information and communication technologies (ICTs) with the “other four billion”. There are a number of great papers in the fall issue, but two stood out to me.
What Constitutes Good ICTD Research?: A few months ago in an exchange on a mailing Jenna Burrell and Kentaro Toyama debated the question posed in the title. After a few rounds, they decided to come together and formalize their discussion. It’s an insightful read.
For the more technical crowd, Networked Systems for Developing Regions (NSDR) just posted their papers from their upcoming workshop. Here are two that I enjoyed.
Message Phone: A User Study and Analysis of Asynchronous Messaging in Rural Uganda: Kurtis Heimerl, RJ Honicky, Eric Brewer, Tapan Parikh explore the value and utility of delay tolerant voice messages for cellular users that live in areas of poor or intermittent network coverage. In their user study, they find that voice messages were quite popular and uniformly preferred over text messages due to their ease of use and the richness of voice.
The Center for Information & Society (CIS) has changed its name to the Technology & Social Change (TASCHA) group.
In a blog post, Christine Prefontaine explains that, “Over the last 10 years we have grown from a three-person team to more than a dozen researchers and program staff, with affiliated faculty from across the University of Washington and a global network of research partners. This year we came together to reflect, take stock of our strengths and emerging trends, and examine who we are, how we work, and how we can affect change. Our new name is the result of this process — and in the coming months you’ll witness a number of changes.”
OpenMRS is an open-source framework for building electronic medical record systems in developing countries. It enables organizations to build and manage health care systems where AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria afflict the lives of millions.
While the framework is quite powerful, it can be difficult for non-expert users to install. Change member, Yaw Anokwa, has developed the OpenMRS Appliance to simplify the process.
The virtual appliance (also known as a virtual machine) is a fully pre-installed and pre-configured application and operating system environment. All users do is double click it to start using OpenMRS. Uninstalling is even easier, simply delete the virtual appliance folder.
If you wanted to try the newest OpenMRS 1.5 release, it is now only a few clicks away.
Open Data Kit featured in UW University Week article titled 'Cell phones become handheld tools for global development'. http://is.gd/4GyBx1 week ago
ODK Collect v1.1 is out. Enables users to collect text, audio, video, barcode and location data efficiently in the field. http://is.gd/4wPW92 weeks ago
