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Agriculture, Health, Health, Health Systems, Humanitarian Assistance, Mobile, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

Medic Mobile introduces first mobile SIM application for healthcare use

Medic Mobile, a mobile health non-profit based in Washington D.C., announced the development of the first mobile SIM application for healthcare on June 6th. SIM apps can operate on 80% of the world’s phones ranging from $15 handsets to Android smart phones, so their potential use means reaching unimagined levels in data collection.

The SIM applications are menu based applications on mobile phones that reduce costs and increase accessibility for patients. Says CEO Josh Nesbit on his blog, “I can imagine all eight million global community health workers utilizing SIM applications to support their work and improve the lives of their patients.” Through these applications, patients don’t need to see a doctor, they can simply register their health data through the app and the data gets sent to health professionals who send feedback.

Medic Mobile is a pioneer in developing SMS based communication solutions. The organization started out with a project in Malawi where their SMS services saved clinical staffers 1,200 hours of patient follow-up time, thousands of dollars in costs and doubled the number of patients who were treated for Tuberculosis. Perhaps their most well known project came after the earthquakes that devastated Haiti. Mobile Medic created an SMS database where people could text the number “4636” to be tagged, mapped and subsequently assisted. Thousands of victims were rescued with this service.

SMS and SIM application based healthcare services can serve as a blueprint in the developing world to alleviate health burdens. Over half of all Africans use mobile technology, and according to an ITU report, over 70% of low and middle-income countries utilize mobile technology. Mobile technologies dominate any other technology in the developing world. They are cheap and conveniently accessible.

Photo Credit: Medic Mobile

Nesbit sees great potential and envisions applications that help patients schedule appointments, access remote consultations and connect with health care professionals during a medical emergency. Nesbit’s products are proof that mobile phones can be a game changer in providing healthcare. They can essentially serve as health professionals at any place and any time. Not even the developed world can claim that.

Medic Mobile, a mobile health company started in college by Josh Nesbit, is a trailblazer in the field.

June 10, 2011/by actualize

Agriculture, Farmer to Farmer, Food Security, Health, Irrigation and Water, Mobile, Originally posted on the GBI Portal, Sustainable Agriculture

Haiti’s Food Security

Haiti’s post-quake food security show signs of improvement, which may get even better with the right mix of policy priorities. Although the Caribbean nation remains more food insecure than it was prior to the January 2009 earthquake, it is 13 percent more food secure than it was in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake.

In order for Haiti to meet the needs of its 2.5 to 3.3 million people thought to be food insecure, there ought to be a raft of bold nationally-led agricultural policies and projects. Haiti is in a prime position to chart this course due to its central position in the U.S initiated Feed the Future investment plan. This country-led initiative aims to foster food security and agricultural development in a truly endogenous manner. In other words, Haitians, like other Feed the Future countries, will have ownership over the process.

Although Haiti’s agricultural productivity hinges on a myriad of bold policy initiative, in my view, two things top the agenda: 1) The establishment of a national ICT policy with key focus on agriculture; and 2) The decentralization of agricultural management and educational facilities.

Despite demonstrable economic gains worldwide from ICTs in agriculture, Haiti still lacks a national ICT policy. A clear ICT policy will provide a guide for action for multilateral agencies, national action and NGO involvement in the ICT for agriculture sector. Haitian farmers are subjected to ad hoc marketing systems, a wide range of anthropogenic shocks, natural disasters, and limited information to make sound cost-benefit analysis. A solid national ICT policy will provide a basis for Haiti and its transnational donors to tackle these challenges in a coordinated manner—eliminating the well-entrenched culture of duplication.

It is imperative that the state take a lead on this to build its credibility and bring order to a development landscape dominated by NGOs—there is one NGO for every 3, 000 Haitian. Since the 1970s , NGOs have steadily gained a toehold in the country. This is largely because of the perception of endemic corruption within the Haitian government.

While I believe that ICTs ought to be used at all three major stages in the agriculture sector –pre-cultivation, crop cultivation and harvesting, and post harvest— it is most critically needed at the first juncture, pre-cultivation, crop selection, land selection, accessing credit and itemizing when to plant. If given the information for the proper selection of the best crops to plant according to their land type, access to input and generous credit, Haitian farmers will be well positioned to make proper cost-benefit analysis and thrive.

To achieve this, the ICT policy must emphasize the use of GIS and remote sensing. GIS and remote sensing technologies may be used to gather information on soil quality and available water resources. This will aid irrigation strategies in Haiti where water management is poor. Further more, the ubiquitous nature of cellphones in Haiti means that this information may be easily disseminated. Farmers may also be alerted about where to get seeds/other inputs and access credit.

To this end, Haiti ought to decentralize its agricultural framework. Haiti has evaded decentralization proposals for decades, but as the post-quake scenario shows, new life ought to be bred into this initiative with urgency. One third of newborn babies are born underweight. Acute under nutrition among children under five years old is five percent and a third of them suffer from chronic under-nutrition.

The collaborative work being done by the Les Cayes campus of the University of Notre Dame d’Haiti (UNDH), an innovative agronomy school, attests to the importance of decentralization. “The University uses its 40 acre farm as a catalyst for outreach, to assist poor farmers in building sustainable livelihoods, to map and protect biodiversity, and to expand civic participation among the rural poor.” Through these interventions, UNDH seeks to contribute to sustainable development and governance, important factors in rebuilding Haiti after the earthquake.

June 6, 2011/by actualize

Agriculture, Agriculture Markets, Extension Service, Farmer to Farmer, Food Security, Health, Mobile, Originally posted on the GBI Portal, Sustainable Agriculture

The Spoken Web: Searching for Farming info by Voice (VIDEO)

The emergence of IBM’s Spoken Web, a mobile innovation that eliminates literacy as a precursor to access the internet, is a game-changer in the ICT for Agriculture sector.

Unlike other efforts to bridge the global information divide, even people with limited to no functional literacy skills will find Spoken Web user-friendly. With nearly 800 million functional illiterates around the world, the inability to read remains a major impediment to the use of ICT4D. This is most acute in the most remote parts of the developing world where livelihoods and agriculture are inextricably linked.

The mobile innovation is essentially a world wide network of VoiceSites joined to make the Spoken Web. Its most essential hardware is a telephone, which people use to browse VoiceSites by saying keywords, also known as VoiLinks.

This rapidly progressing network of voice recordings is predicated on a system called VoiGem, which simplifies the process of creating voice-based applications. VoiGem is unique compared to existing interactive voice response technology because it allows users to create their own VoiceSites that consists of voice pages (VoiceXML files) that may be linked. Each page is identified by the user’s phone number. This identification mode allows the user to easily edit VoiceSites and pages from their phone.

The mobile-centric nature of this development reflects a global trend and complements a development need, particularly for agriculture. Although small scale farmers, scattered across some of the most far-flung places around the globe, make up a large portion of the 5 billion people without access to the internet and computers, a growing number of these people own cellphones. In fact, farmers constitute a strong contingent among the 3 in 4 people worldwide who own mobiles. Although only a fifth of those with mobile subscriptions worldwide have access to mobile broadband services, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) “predicts that within the next five years, more people will hop onto the Web from laptops and mobile gadgets than from desktop computers”.

As more farmers join the growing legion of wired folks, they will have faster and more reliable opportunities to access and share information. This development will reduce information asymmetries, structure and strengthen agricultural markets by bringing the internet to parts of the world where small scale farmers, consumers, middlemen and traders have limited knowledge about where to access and trade food.

The technology is also culturally appropriate given the oral nature of many cultures in the developing world. Farmers will also have the opportunity to efficaciously share valuable indigenous farming retentions.

As with most things, the Spoken Web also comes with challenges. Chief among the challenges is that though v oice-recognition technology can match search terms against a previously processed index of recorded voice sites, it presents cumbersome results. However, the technology is being refined to be more precise. Precision is especially important because farmers and other end-users will not be able to retain all the information found on lengthy voice pages/sites, and they may not have the literacy skills to jot down points. Interestingly though, the Spoken Web comes with a fast-forward feature that enables the user to listen as if they were skim-reading.

Despite these challenges, the technology has been successfully piloted in eight Indian villages. It is now a central part of farming and health-care delivery in four Indian states, parts of Thailand and Brazil.

June 3, 2011/by actualize

Agriculture, Agriculture Markets, Food Security, Health, Irrigation and Water, Originally posted on the GBI Portal, Sustainable Agriculture

U.S Leadership on Global Food Security

U.S leadership on global food security will get a major boost for the fiscal year 2011. This follows strong bipartisan support from Congress for a $1.15 billion budget to tackle food security issues around the world. Last week, USAID Administrator Dr. Raj Shah announced that nearly $1 billion will go towards Feed the Future, a global initiative launched by President Obama in 2009 to tackle hunger through sustained and endogenous multi-stakeholder partnerships.

Dr. Raj said, “$90 million will be spent on strengthening our nutrition programming”. Since the world food crisis in 2008, which caused riots in several countries and toppled governments, food security and agriculture grew in prominence on the international agenda.

He says, pending congressional approval, the agency will contribute $100 million to the Global Agriculture and Food Security Program, a joint multilateral trust fund established in partnership with the World Bank, to address food security and agriculture globally. Since its conception in 2009, the fund attracted nearly $1 billion from donors, and allocated over $330 million to eight countries.

Conflict, natural disasters and the slow integration of ICT into agricultural policy remains a major impediment to food security and the improvement of livelihoods. Nearly 2 billion people worldwide are unable to grow or get enough food to eat. Most of those affected by chronic food security problems live in rustic areas, where they have limited information about where to access and trade food, in the least developed countries.

The World Bank has warned that the problem is likely to become even more intractable in the next two decades. According to the Bank’s report, Reengaging in Agricultural Water Management: Challenges and Options, “by 2030 food demand will double as world population increases by an additional two billion people. The increase in food demand will come mostly from developing countries.” The publication says improved food security depends on increased agricultural productivity and improved water management across the developing world.

June 2, 2011/by actualize

Agriculture, Health, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

At PATH, Delivering Information Technology in Challenging Locations

I’ve just returned from PATH’s offices in Hanoi and Phnom Penh, where a group from our information services team reviewed the state of our global health nonprofit’s technical infrastructure there. We also talked with our Vietnam and Cambodia Country Program staff about partnering on projects that include a software development component. I came home to Seattle knowing that this is truly an exciting time to be applying technology solutions in the developing world

May 6, 2011/by actualize

Agriculture, Environment, Health, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

Researchers collect ‘signals intelligence’ on insect pests

Entomologist Richard Mankin examines signals collected by an inexpensive prototype system (on the bench, at his fingertips) for automated insect detection and identification.

Photo Credit: Agricultural Research Service

It may sound a little far fetched for development right now, but using off the shelf components to detect insects by sound could have some important applications in environment, health, and agriculture some day – and these days, “some day” always seems a little sooner than you would expect. This could be important for example in identifying the vector of a particularly virulent emerging infectious disease, or in early detection of and rapid response to an invasive forest or agricultural pest. File it away in the “you never know” drawer.

Researchers collect ‘signals intelligence’ on insect pests.

March 24, 2011/by actualize

Agriculture, Health, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

Gates: mobile phones and global health

At a keynote address at the mHealth Summit in Washington in November 2010, Bill Gates discussed the use of mobile phone technology for health programs. But he cautions “we have to approach these things with some humility … we have to hold ourselves to some pretty tough metrics to see if it’s really making a difference.”

AFP: Mobile technology can help improve global health: Gates.

March 1, 2011/by actualize

Agriculture, Health, Health, Health Systems, Infectious Diseases, Mobile, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

2011 mHealth Trends- Webinar

MobiHealthNews held their first webinar, last Thursday, February 11,to discuss mobile health news and trends that will likely emerge during the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) 2011 annual gathering this year in Orlando. The webinar, which was attended by health professionals and practioners around the world was the first of its kind to predict future innovations and trends in mobile health.

Brian Dolan, MobiHealthNews editor, discussed the increasing expansion of peripheral health devices. Most of these were manufactured to assist medical practitioners in the developed world, but a few stood out as contenders for development context:

iHealth blood pressure dock

The iHealth blood pressure dock, which allows you to monitor your blood pressure blood on your iPod touch, iPhone, and iPad .

iPhone ECG case developed by AliveCor called the iPhonECG is a great new device. This gadget turns your Apple iPhone 4 into Electrocardiogram (ECG) by putting it into a special $100 case, however it has not been approved for sale in the U.S. yet. This would possess the capability to help healthcare works in the field monitor electrical activity of the heart and detect any heart disease, allowing them to assess the patient’s level of risk more accurately.
Cellscope which turns a cell phone into a high-magnification microscope.is a revolutionary approach to curing infectious disease are a huge upcoming trend that will launch throughout the year and gain FDA approval.
The CellScope

The HIMSS will hold its annual conference on February 20-24, where hundreds of corporate and non-for-profit members come together to collaborate on their mission to transform healthcare through effective use of IT and management systems.. Each year a few innovations stand out among the crowd. Two years ago, one of the big themes that emerged was that an electronic medical records (EMR) vendor developed a smartphone application. Last year, tablets such as the iPad, emerged as catalysts for mHealth devices to grow in usage.

February 14, 2011/by actualize

Agriculture, Climate Change, Democracy & Governance, Environment, Environment, Health, Land Management, Originally posted on the GBI Portal, Pollution Prevention, Water

Open source software and participatory GIS

I work with a small NGO in the Cook Islands called Te Rito Enua. We recently concluded a pilot project funded by the Asian Development Bank to test the use of participatory GIS techniques to help develop community-scale climate adaptation strategies. Some of our key findings echo those Oregon State University scientists Sally Duncan and Denise Lach. As reported in the People and Place blog, they observe that

“Exchange of ideas and knowledge with the assistance of a technology that is both analytical and visual draws participants into new kinds of inquiry, calling upon broader kinds and definitions of knowledge and experience. In such a setting, GIS technology lends itself to the mapping of ideas as well as landscapes.” (emphasis is mine)

In our own work, we found that that the approach provides communities with the tools to assess climate risk according to their own frames of reference. Linking models with personal experience and traditional ecological knowledge gave the communities tangible evidence of climate risk that empowers them to own the problem and develop personal and collective responses based on their own needs and priorities. The participatory GIS process highlights behavioral and development issues that affect the vulnerability of individual households and the community at large. There was a discernable sense of empowerment by participating communities in developing vulnerability maps and planning on the basis of the spatially organized information.

Replicating the process is problematic though. We opted to use expensive high-end commercial GIS software to match the system used by the government. All the GIS expertise in the country (basically 2 people at the start of the project) were schooled in the use government system. We needed to work with those people. But the high end systems are a formidable barrier to entry; acquiring the software, hardware, and training costs thousands of dollars. Communities and NGOs lack those resources, and the emerging, computer-savvy generation lacks learning opportunities. In our final report, we recommended the use of open source software and support for regional training to build up the GIS community.

Fortunately the support for open-source GIS is growing fast. Some resources for beginners include:

The Participatory GIS Forum (www.ppgis.net) (and be sure to see the very helpful email list for PPGIS, links on the site).

Mapping Across Borders/Digital Distractions blog ( http://mikedotonline.wordpress.com/ )

Quantum GIS open source software (www.qgis.org)

And a new site, Training Kit on Participatory Spatial Information Management and Communications (http://pgis-tk-en.cta.int/)

Don’t forget that good data layers can often be found at Data Basin, and you can upload and share your files there. (www.databasin.org)

I’ve experienced significant resistance to participatory mapping in the past from the GIS technical community. It is true that you can produce complete garbage in GIS. And garbage, in planning, can be dangerous. But the answer doesn’t lie in treating geospatial planning as an esoteric art and shunning the novices. The answer lies in widening the pool of experts and providing support for grassroots initiatives. Duncan and Lech observe:

“The frequent repetition of the phrase “re-framing the debate” during focus-group discussions highlighted the progression from the one-way communication model, in which scientists impart their findings, to the dynamic process of engaging GIS technology as a tool of inquiry, mediation, and communication. Ideas suggested for a broader debate included making assumptions explicit on GIS maps, using the power of GIS to examine new questions, and sharing responsibility for new kinds of learning. …”

Duncan, S. and Lech, D. 2006. GIS Technology in Natural Resource Management: Process as a Tool of Change. Cartographica 41:3, 201-205. DOI: 10.3138/3571-88W4-77H2-3617.

Sounds like development to me.

[The Te Rito Enua project report can be downloaded at http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1735507/ADB%20SGI%20report/Final%20Report-web.pdf]

February 13, 2011/by actualize

Agriculture, Climate Change, Democracy & Governance, Environment, Environment, Environmental Compliance, Health, Land Management, Originally posted on the GBI Portal, Policy Development, Water

Use of neural net classifiers to map invasive plants using remote sensing data

Over the past year, I’ve been working with a Cook Islands NGO, Te Rito Enua, with funding from the Asian Development Bank, to develop a pilot project on participatory GIS as a tool to assist island communities to develop climate adaptation strategies. While there, Mona Matepi, president of TRE, called my attention to the problem of invasive vines on the island. Three species of woody vines* are colonizing the island forests, causing massive deforestation. They overtop and kill trees, replacing the forest with a solid jungle of vines. Since Rarotonga is dependent upon surface water for its entire supply, and since vines were killing the trees in its forested watershed, it seems like a non-trivial issue. Nobody knows how the vines will affect water supply. Will they reduce surface water supply through evapotranspiration? Will they hold the soils as well as the trees they are replacing? How will they respond to the more frequent cyclones and droughts that climate models predict? And, if they are a problem, how can they be controlled? Many questions to answer – our challenge right now is to find support for research into the issues and the options available. If no one does anything, there’s a chance, and its not a tiny one, that there could someday be a humanitarian crisis that would have severe implications for one of the dwindling number of robust Polynesian cultures remaining.

I asked University of Maryland doctoral candidate Benjamin White, a remote sensing specialist, for advice on how to illustrate the extent of the vine infestation. The island is rugged and steep, difficult to map on foot. But I was able to take some measurements using a handheld GPS unit. Ben offered to have a go at classifying the vines using my field observations as training data. Commercial remote sensing imagery provider GeoEye donated high-resolution (4m and 1m) satellite images. Ben developed a sophisticated neural net classifier, and processed the images as R/G/IR reflectance, reflectance-based NDVI, principal components, mean texture and a quick reflectance to “dense vegetation” classification. The final result was uploaded to Google Earth for visualization purposes; Google Earth data is not useful for this kind of application, but overlaying the classification results on a Google Earth image gives a context in terms of location and topography. Additional satellite imagery could provide complete ground coverage and (subject to availability) time series to measure change in land cover.

I’m hoping that the image will drive home how bad the problem is, and mobilize some support for Te Rito Enua and the Cook Islands government to get a handle on the vine problem.

Heartfelt thanks go to Ben White and the University of Maryland Geography Department, GeoEye, and the Asian Development Bank for support.

* the vines are Cardiospermum grandiflorum, Mikania micrantha, and Merremia peltata.

via GREEN HAND.

February 13, 2011/by actualize