Cell Phone as a Platform for Healthcare AwardsMicrosoft Research has announced that it is supporting academics from 14 universities around the world in their research of innovative ways to advance healthcare services and solutions, as well as mitigate the growing healthcare concerns. Microsoft Research will provide this support through $1 million in funding for the “Cell Phone as a Platform for Healthcare” Request for Proposal (RFP). At the current rate of population growth in developing nations, two billion people could be living in impoverished conditions without access to healthcare, education, or sanitation by the year 2030 according to the Department for International Development in the UK (DFID). The appropriate use of mobile information and communication technology (ICT), both hardware and software, has the potential to help mitigate some these growing problems. This worldwide RFP seeks to incubate creative and novel healthcare solutions that are accessible, affordable, and relevant for ‘smart’ mobile phones. An additional focus is the creation of appropriate services, systems, and infrastructures to provide solutions to the global healthcare community. Cell phones and inexpensive, commonly available sensor devices can create an opportunity to reach people who until now have not previously had access to technology-based healthcare solutions. Cell Phone as a Platform for Healthcare RFP Award Recipients
CellScope: Portable Low-cost Imaging for Disease Diagnosis
Daniel Fletcher
University of California, Berkeley, USA Effective healthcare requires reliable patient data and a trained physician to interpret the data and guide treatment. In many developing countries, bringing those two components together – reliable data and trained physicians – is a tremendous challenge. Healthcare personnel are frequently under-trained and under-equipped, often facing excessive patient loads with minimal equipment. Light microscopy is one of the most important clinical tools for routine examinations. However, high-quality light microscopes commonly available in the developed world are rarer than physicians in some developing countries. We are working to turn the camera of a cell phone into a clinical-quality light microscope that can transmit images of patient samples remotely for evaluation by specialists. Such a cell phone microscope – which we call the CellScope – will address both healthcare data collection and diagnosis problems in developing countries by linking the two through wireless communication. 
ARCHANGEL
George Polyzos, Elias Efstathiou
Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece The world population of people over the age of 65 is growing rapidly at a rate of 800,000 per month. Recent advances in sensor technology, cellular networks and information technology promise to improve the well-being of the elderly by assisting them in their daily activities and monitoring their health status, thus enabling them to lead their lives to a larger extent independently from healthcare institutions and their caretakers. The aim of the ARCHANGEL project is to design, implement, and validate a cost-effective, secure , adaptable and interoperable framework for learning and monitoring the daily behavior of the elderly using advanced sensor networking, machine learning, and controlled interaction with caretakers. The resulting system will be based on off-the-shelf sensors and positioning-enabled cellular phones. 
Cell Phone Applications for Clinical Diagnostic Theraputic and Public Health Use by Front Line Health Care Workers
Jim Black, Rens Scheepers, Liz Sonenberg
The University of Melbourne, Australia Mozambique is, paradoxically, both one of the poorest countries in the world and one of the most rapid adopters of cell phone technology. The cell phone network reaches a large proportion of the country, and large numbers of health workers already carry them. This project will create a suite of applications that make use of cell phone processors to improve diagnostic and therapeutic options for front-line Mozambican health workers. These applications include: reference material in the cell phone’s memory; calculators for clinical decision support such as a drug dosage calculator; and a processor to analyze inputs from medical hardware sensors. The project will also document the impact of the suite of application from the perspective of front-line health workers in Mozambique. 
CardioPro: A Mobile Platform for Continuous Real-Time Monitoring and Automatic Detection of Cardiovascular Disease
Allen Cheng
University of Pittsburgh, USA Cardiovascular Disease (CVD) is by far the leading cause of death in the world for both women and men of all ethnic backgrounds. The Electrocardiogram (ECG) is the most widely adopted clinical tool that measures and records the electrical activity of the heart from the body surface. This electrical activity is related to the impulse that travels through the heart, which determines its rate and rhythm. The overarching goal of this research seeks to establish a cell phone-based wearable ECG platform capable of performing continuous ambulatory monitoring and recording of ECG in real time, generating individualized cardio health summary report in plain language, and automatically detecting CVD signs at any place and anytime. This wearable platform is codenamed "CardioPro." 
Interactive Structured Multi-modal Clinical Guidelines on Cell Phones
M. Sriram Iyengar
University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, USA In developing countries, where physician density is low and accessibility to health resources is scarce, non-physician care providers (NPCPs) are typically the sole providers of medical care to millions. In many such countries, most NPCPs have not completed high school, have very basic levels of clinical training and their performance often falls short of acceptable standards. In particular, NPCPs often do not follow standardized guidelines of care when given in paper-based form. The use of multiple modalities (voice, text, pictures, video) to impart information has been shown to enhance understanding. "GuideView" will support NPCPs by means of interactive, structured, multi-modal clinical guidelines on multiple platforms including Windows Mobile cell phones. Three GuideView compatible clinical guidelines in the areas of wound-care, musculo-skeletal trauma, and pediatric fever will be developed.  (right to left) Dylan Marin, Permanand Mohan, Ahad Deen, Salys SultanA Caribbean-wide Healthcare Management System Based on Cellular Phone Technology
Permanand Mohan
The University of the West Indies, Trinidad & Tobago This project is the first phase of a larger project that involves the development of a Caribbean-wide Healthcare Management System using cellular phone technology. The long term objective of the project is the development of a network that would integrate the medical resources of the entire region thereby promoting the sharing of medical expertise and resources in a region with very poor healthcare facilities; yet, having very good cellular phone infrastructure. A healthcare system known as a MediNet will be developed for Trinidad and Tobago, targeting two diseases, diabetes and cardio-vascular technology. The system will contain components that receive information from monitoring devices attached to patients and then transmit this information to a server using a cellular network. At the server, a data reasoning engine extracts all relevant information from the data captured. The alert notification component ensures that the medical officer(s) are notified depending on the severity of the case and the appropriate response action is initiated whether it is a phone call or an onsite visit. The system may also make suggestions to the patient on his/her cellular phone as a result of its reasoning processes. 
Cell Phone as a Platform for Healthcare: Low Cost USB Ultrasound Probe
William Richard
Washington University in St. Louis, USA Access to basic medical imaging technologies is non-existent in many developing countries and in many underserved rural and urban communities. Prenatal care via the use of even the most basic ultrasonic imaging technology, for example, could save many lives, yet available portable ultrasound systems are still expensive and complicated to operate. We have developed a family of low-cost ultrasound probes used with laptops and small-form-factor PCs, but these probes are not currently compatible with Smart Phones. We will modify low-cost USB ultrasound probes to be compatible with Smart Phones. They will enable access to an important diagnostic and screening technology in underserved rural and urban communities.   
Use Smart Phones to Promote Diabetes Self-Management: Robust Elderly in Urban and Rural China
Jiao Ma, Cynthia LeRouge, Joseph Flaherty, et al.
Saint Louis University, USA China is one of the countries with the largest number of people suffering from diabetes (King, Aubert, & Herman, 1998). Continuing rising in prevalence of diabetics has become a major public health problem in modern China (Cheng, 2003). Recent studies attribute the burden of diabetes to poor patient practices and limited knowledge of the clinical complexities of diabetes (Bouldin, et al. 2002). Some recent studies have indicated that cell phones can be used as a tool in care of diabetes, particularly through smart messaging systems (Kim & Jeong, 2006; Benhamu et al., 2007). China is experiencing a proliferation of mobile phone usage (China Statistical Yearbook, 2003). Though most of the rural areas in China still lack telecommunications infrastructure, dramatic migration trends are leading people out of these areas (UN, 2002). This project proposes to design and prototype an age and culturally appropriate, interactive diabetes self-management system on smart phones for robust (independent in activities of daily living) elderly population with diabetes in urban and rural China. Application of Smart Phone in ‘Better Border Healthcare Program’ (BBHP)
Jaranit Kaewkungwal
Mahidol University, Thailand The goal of the BBHP is to develop models for utilizing smart cell phone as health communication tool in the under-served communities along Thailand border in order to: (1) to improve maternal health focusing on antenatal care (ANC), (2) to reduce child mortality focusing on Expanded Program on Immunization (EPI), and (3) to prevent/monitor disease incidence and to ensure treatment outcomes focusing on malaria due to malaria endemic in the border area. The project will be implemented in under-served rural communities composing of approximately 4200 Thai and minority people near Thai-Myanmar border. SmartTrack: A SmartPhone-based Distributed Drug Information System
Lakshminarayanan Subramanian, Mary Ann Hopkins, Mekbib Gemeda, Brian A. Levine, Barbara Rapchak, Eddie Donton
New York University, USA Nearly 40 million people in Africa suffer from HIV/AIDS and African governments and many aid agencies have been trying to combat this problem by vigorously promoting Highly Active Anti-Retroviral Therapy (HAART) programs. Despite the enormous subsidies offered by governments along with free Anti-Retro Viral (ARV) drugs supplied by agencies, the introduction and implementation of HAART programs on large scales has been extremely hard due to two fundamental problems: (a) lack of adherence to the ARV therapy regimen which often requires patients to consume two to five drugs a day; (b) lack of accountability in the drug distribution system leading to theft, counterfeit medications and corruption. In the SmartTrack project, we propose to create a highly reliable, widely available, secure and ultra low-cost Smartphone-based distributed drug information system that can be used for tracking the flow and consumption of ARV drugs in HAART programs. Enabling Community Health Workers with Mobile Phones
Gaetano Borriello, Neal Lesh, Paul Yager
University of Washington, USA Community health workers (CHWs) are playing an increasingly important role in the efforts to improve the health of rural populations in low-income countries. Our project seeks to provide mobile technologies for these CHWs using the cell phone as the primary platform. The capabilities of the platform will permit health surveys and interventions to be conducted asynchronously by lightly-trained individuals following well-established international medical protocols. We will be exploiting the camera capabilities of the platform to automatically interpret diagnostic tests conducted with an assay card. The prototype will be field tested in rural Tanzania in collaboration with BRAC. Fetal Heart Rate and Activity Monitoring via Smart Phones
Alfred Tan, Martin Masek
Edith Cowan University, Australia The project will research and develop a fetal heart rate (FHR) and activity monitoring system using smart phones running the Microsoft Mobile platform. Such system can be coupled with an inexpensive portable doppler FHR monitor to provide quality ante-natal care for expecting mothers living in remote and rural areas far away from medical care. One such remote and rural community which can benefit from our innovation in telemedicine is the Indigenous community in outback Australia. Among the Australian Indigenous community the rate of pre-term birth is significantly higher than the non-Indigenous population. It has been known that quality ante-natal care can bring about significant improvement to the survival statistics of Indigenous babies. Our innovation can help to achieve this. Virtual Speech Therapist for Stroke Survivors with Aphasia in Rural Malaysia
Sri Kurniawan, Dominic Massaro
University of California, Santa Cruz, USA In Malaysia, 40,000 people suffer from stroke every year. Post-stroke treatment focuses mainly on mobility therapy with a poor rehabilitation program for stroke-acquired aphasia, a communication impairment that involves at least some form of deficit in language comprehension. Lack of immediate and regular access to speech therapy is one of the reasons that only 30% of stroke survivors claimed only part recovery, with the problem more pronounced with those living in rural areas. This project aims at developing cell phone-based communication therapy for stroke survivors with aphasia living in rural Malaysia using an animated virtual tutor. Energy: A Crucial Resource in Cell Phone as a Platform for Health Care
Chris Gniady, John Hartman
University of Arizona, USA The goal of this project is to design and implement an infrastructure for semi-autonomous health care monitoring applications that can monitor the patents' health for extended periods with limited access to battery recharging and cell phone reception. Many issues must be addressed to make cell phones a viable platform for remotely monitoring health care, including security, reliability, and privacy, but perhaps the most basic is energy. Cell phones are battery-operated, making energy a resource that must be managed carefully to ensure the longest running time before the battery is depleted. In a sense, all other issues are secondary – without energy, the cell phone simply will not function. In this project, we therefore focus on reducing the energy demand placed on the cell phones by remote health care monitoring. Cell Phone as a Platform for Healthcare RFP
|
