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Rural communities
Life in rural communities in some countries can be quite different from big cities. There is a severe shortage of medical staff, and the child mortality is still quite high. For instance in Ghana only 54% of the women attend the minimum number of four prenatal visits. In rural area the distance to modern antenatal care providers can be considerable. They might have to travel more than 15 km to a modern health care provider.
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Health workers
In each community, a volunteer member - called the Community Health Worker (CHW) - can be trained to carry out health related tasks. A CHW is not a formal health professional, but a member of the community in high consideration by the stakeholders of the community where she is from. This is particularly important to involve a highly committed volunteer who is also well respected by the other members of the community. In our project, CHWs are trained and equipped with several tools including low-cost mobile phones.
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Promoting antenatal visits
One of the goals of our project is to promote antenatal care. A health worker can monitor her own community, and remind continuously the people of her comunity to go to the closest clinic. Moreover, she can also detect dangerous signs and report them immediately to the clinic or ambulance.
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Remote ultrasound
One way to improve the management is to enable access to remote medical expertise and technology for local healthcare facilities by equipping them with advanced telecommunication services for telemedicine purposes, and then to appropriately use remote expertise and technologies. In fact, even with continuous reminders from the health workers, to some pregnant women it can be difficult to attend gynecological visits. We devised a system that will allow remotely to check ultrasound scans.
To compensate the hurdles of reaching a clinic to perform a gynecological examination,
we equipped trained personnel with portable ultrasound machines and trained them on how to acquire
good quality scans.
These scans are then sent almost in realtime to gynecologists located in big centres who will
promptly give feedback.
Click here, if you want to know more.
Low-cost mobile phone can be easily endowed with powerful apps, based on Java or Android technology, equipping the health workers with easy tools to monitor and communicate.
Click here, if you want to know more.
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