A new mobile-based technology that generates real time data and aids much faster detection of disease outbreak promises to reduce the cost of biosurveillance in the country by almost half.
This technology, pilot-tested in a block of Sivaganga district of Tamil Nadu, is in the process of being scaled up. It is being?jointly?monitored by Sri Lanka-based technology think tank?LIRNEasia, Rural Technology and Business Incubator (RTBI) of IIT Madras and National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bangalore.
Harnessed on a larger scale, this technology could prove immensely useful in mapping the spread and peaks of outbreaks such as swine flu and chikungunya in the country. While the present paper-based biosurveillance system costs around $26,000 per district monthly, the proposed system would cost around $13,250,?estimates Nuwan Waidyanatha of LIRNEasia. As of now, Vodafone is in charge of supplying customised phones that would otherwise cost around Rs 4,000. The proposed technology entails loading a unique software onto the mobile phones. Relevant information is fed and sent to a central database.
The information is then analysed on 50 dimensions at the current technological level that includes time series to determine seasonality of disease, space platform, disease spread count at a specific location among other variables.
On an average, it takes approximately one and half hours to feed the details of over 100 patients in the mobile. The process that took months could be reduced to minutes through this technology, said Waidyanatha. It also eliminates the need for physical travelling, meetings and storage of data among other things, he added.
Workers in public health centres and sub-centres submit a weekly patient health information report through a paper-based system to officials in the district health departments. By the time the information reaches state-level officials, where it is collated and aggregated to arrive at any meaningful patterns, and medical interventions are planned, the contagious disease spreads to a larger area, affecting many more.
Besides the one-time costs incurred on handsets, the pilot project showed that data from each PHC that attends to around 100 patients daily?can be sent to the central database system for less than Rs 200 a month.
While the technology is up and running in a province of Sri Lanka, another is in the process of adopting it. LIRNEasia plans to take it to Pakistan, Nepal, Phillipines, Thailand and Indonesia in the near future.