18 October 2018
IEEE Global Humanitarian Technology Conference (GHTC) is a cross-disciplinary annual conference focused on advancing technology for the benefit of humanity in the context of the Sustainable Development Goals. GHTC brings together stakeholders from the public, private, education and research and societal (not-for-profit) sectors to address the critical issues for the benefit of the resource-constrained and vulnerable populations in the world. The program includes a track on Technology Enabled Healthcare as well as sessions related to Disaster Mitigation, Affordable & Clean Energy, Agriculture & Food Security, Applications for Poverty Alleviation, Clean Water & Sanitation, Community engagement and capacity-building, Connectivity & Communication, Healthcare, Humanitarian Challenges & Opportunities, Education and Entrepreneurship.
mHealth4Afrika is co-designing a modular adaptable and extensible multilingual framework that integrates Electronic Medical Records and Electronic Health Record functionality with medical sensors and data visualisation tools. It is co-designed in cooperation with Ministries of Health, district health officers, clinic managers and health workers in primary healthcare facilities in resource constrained urban, rural and deep rural environments in Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi and South Africa.
mHealth4Afrika undertook a validation of the Beta v1 prototype with 36 healthcare workers (19 women and 17 men) from 11 health clinics across Northwest Ethiopia, Western Kenya, Southern Malawi and Eastern Cape, South Africa during November - December 2017. This provided critical insight in terms of priorities for new programs to be added and usability issues to be considered in the updated beta specification.
The results from the Beta v1 validation will be published in the proceedings for the Global Humanitarian Technology Conference and presented in the Scientific Programme by Paul Cunningham, IIMC (mHealth4Afrika Coordinator) on 20 October 2018 - Cunningham, M., Cunningham, P., van Greunen, D., Kanjo, C., Kweyu, E. and Tilahun, B. (2018) mHealth4Afrika Beta v1 Validation in Rural and Deep Rural Clinics in Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi and South Africa, Proceedings of IEEE Global Humanitarian Technology Conference (GHTC) 2018, IEEE Xplore.
The Beta v1 validation was a very productive exercise, providing valuable insights into how the healthcare workers will use the platform, usability and appropriateness of the Beta v1 platform functionality and prioritised additional programs requested to be added to other Beta iterations. These findings have informed the co-design of subsequent mHealth4Afrika beta iterations, which are currently being validated by the health facilities.