Information and Communication Technologies for Development

After meeting with Rich earlier this week, a lot of our group's confusion was clarified, and now we have a better idea of what our project involves. Making the best use of our skills, each of us has also been able to carve out a niche on the team so that we can all contribute to the development of the project in each of our various directions.

My role on the team will be to assess the ergonomics of the system we will be proposing, so I've started to think about some of the features we should make sure our system has: for a start, it should minimally affect the workflow at the clinic and be really simple to use and troubleshoot. While the second factor will become a more important thing to keep in mind when we actually start designing the system, the first idea is something we have been keeping in mind since the beginning of the project.

Two tasks we need our system to be able to do are: (1) detect the entry of the patient and (2) record whether the patient has pneumonia or not. We plan to implement (1) using an RFID system, where the patient would be wearing a passive RFID tag in the form of a an anklet or bracelet, and an RFID reader detects the child's entrance. This we figured would be minimally interfering because the tag would be automatically detected by the reader. It would not involve active participation by either the doctor or the mother (or whoever brings in the child), so this should not affect the workflow. At one point we were considering using a card with a barcode or some unique identifier that the mother would swipe or present to the reader. The advantage would have been that the card would last longer and would not be exposed to the everyday wear and tear that the anklet would. Additionally, we didn't know how safe an RFID tag would be right next to the baby' s skin. However, we canceled the card idea because there's a chance that the mother might forget to bring the card to the clinic, and sometimes other guardians bring the baby in for the check up. Plus, it involved active participation which significantly decreases the chances of the detection of the baby's entry. Because we're aiming for a 100% detection rate, the best option seemed for the passive tag to be on the baby.

Step 2 involves the doctor. When the baby gets detected and is identified as a patient who is a part of the study, the doctor is prompted to answer a yes/no question regarding the baby's pneumonia condition. For this we decided to have the doctor enter the data instead of anyone else because it should be immediate. Additionally, if we had made arrangements for anyone else to enter the data, such as the patient's mother, because it would involve the active participation of the family member, it would introduce a greater risk of missing the detection. Therefore, we decided it would be best to have the doctor send the patient data.