Information and Communication Technologies for Development

Our conference call and subsequent emails with our lead contact in Pakistan (Dr. Aamir Khan) have made one thing clear - the goal of our project is to design a system which collects accurate statistics about clinical visits and pneumonia occurrences in the 7500 participating infants. The first assumption is that you can't trust unincentivized participants (doctor or patients) to change their workflow to accomodate data collection. If you do, then you will inevitably lose data points to people who are already to busy or worried about their health to add to a checklist.

The current proposal is to provide an RFID bracelet to a participating infant upon birth. This bracelet is culturally acceptable and already worn by children to ward off an evil eye, so the design constraints are to fit an RFID tag inside this small amulet (and a battery if you're using active RFID, which might be necessary). This method is flawless in that it does not depend on humans to remember a card - upon entering the clinic, the child will be identified, the doctor text messaged, and the correct information collected. The pitfalls are potentially not being able to fit an RFID tag and battery into a bracelet, the silent malfunction of the bracelet, or the lack of direct identification of the patient (you just know the patient is one of 100 people in the clinic).

A more direct approach, but one more susceptible to human failure, is to provide parents with an ID card with a barcode on it. The barcode (or passive RFID) can be scanned when a parent/grandparent brings their child to a clinic (if they don't forget), and the infant can be instantly identified and data collected. The problem here is to incentivize the parent to not forget (perhaps telling them of the specialized attention should their baby come down with pneumonia is good enough, but the problem then becomes that the parent will ignore scanning the card if the child breaks a leg, or something unrelated). The benefits are the durability of the system - barcodes don't break if you don't lose them, and the direct connection of the child's identity to the child.

I have faith in humanity to get this right, and less faith in the technological approach working. That's in conflict with what the more experienced people on the ground think, so i should really try to understand the human side of things before taking too many steps further.