[xtypo_dropcap]H[/xtypo_dropcap]ealth care workers in remote areas of developing countries are now able to connect with physicians in more urban settings to diagnose patient illnesses thanks to the mobile device technology Sana developed by a team of students, faculty, and volunteers based at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
The open source mobile device software Sana, formerly known as Moca, allows healthcare workers to use their smartphones operating Google’s Android technology to photograph patients, collect data, and then send the data via text message to an electronic medical record system. Doctors that participate in the program review the data and return a preliminary diagnosis, suggested procedures, or recommended actions via text message.
“[Sana] is really about training other countries rather than just giving them the technology,” said Leo Anthony Celi, Sana co-founder and researcher at the Harvard-MIT Division of Science and Technology, in an article on the MIT news website.
Sana’s service is classified into a larger “telemedicine” initiative, defined by the AmericanTelemedicine Association as the use of medical information exchanged from one site to another via electronic communications to improve patients’ health status. Other categories of telemedicine include medical call centers, home telehealth, remote monitoring, and outsourced clinical services.
Telemedical services aimed at poorer countries include Click Diagnostics and ChildCount+, a free open-source mobile health platform that allows community health workers (CHW) in sub-Saharan Africa to use text message communication to register their patients and report their health status. ChildCount+ intends to help CHWs to register every child and pregnant woman, screen them for malnutrition every 90 days, and monitor patients for malaria, diarrhea, and pneumonia.
The Sana team traveled to Mexico to learn how the Sana data entry and diagnostic system may assist health care workers there.
“This is a list of underweight children. I let their mothers know and they took them to the nutrition center,” said Catalina Musiño Martinez, a self-taught health care worker in Santa Cruz, Mexico, in a video on the Sana website.
“She [Ms. Martinez] can translate information back about wounds and tissue problems or changes in fetal activity back to a central location and be told whether they are normal and abnormal and why, and then after time she will develop an extra intuition about the medical problems in her community,” said Gari Clifford, co-founder and faculty of the Oxford University department of Engineering science.
MIT news reports that a Sana team member recently participated in a round table discussion at the United Nations Summit on Millennium Development Goals, and in addition to traveling to Mexico, the Sana team has traveled to India and the Philippines to train health care workers and developers to use Sana.
The open source mobile device software Sana, formerly known as Moca, allows healthcare workers to use their smartphones operating Google’s Android technology to photograph patients, collect data, and then send the data via text message to an electronic medical record system. Doctors that participate in the program review the data and return a preliminary diagnosis, suggested procedures, or recommended actions via text message.
“[Sana] is really about training other countries rather than just giving them the technology,” said Leo Anthony Celi, Sana co-founder and researcher at the Harvard-MIT Division of Science and Technology, in an article on the MIT news website.
Sana’s service is classified into a larger “telemedicine” initiative, defined by the AmericanTelemedicine Association as the use of medical information exchanged from one site to another via electronic communications to improve patients’ health status. Other categories of telemedicine include medical call centers, home telehealth, remote monitoring, and outsourced clinical services.
Telemedical services aimed at poorer countries include Click Diagnostics and ChildCount+, a free open-source mobile health platform that allows community health workers (CHW) in sub-Saharan Africa to use text message communication to register their patients and report their health status. ChildCount+ intends to help CHWs to register every child and pregnant woman, screen them for malnutrition every 90 days, and monitor patients for malaria, diarrhea, and pneumonia.
The Sana team traveled to Mexico to learn how the Sana data entry and diagnostic system may assist health care workers there.
“This is a list of underweight children. I let their mothers know and they took them to the nutrition center,” said Catalina Musiño Martinez, a self-taught health care worker in Santa Cruz, Mexico, in a video on the Sana website.
“She [Ms. Martinez] can translate information back about wounds and tissue problems or changes in fetal activity back to a central location and be told whether they are normal and abnormal and why, and then after time she will develop an extra intuition about the medical problems in her community,” said Gari Clifford, co-founder and faculty of the Oxford University department of Engineering science.
MIT news reports that a Sana team member recently participated in a round table discussion at the United Nations Summit on Millennium Development Goals, and in addition to traveling to Mexico, the Sana team has traveled to India and the Philippines to train health care workers and developers to use Sana.
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