Portable Health Clinic: A Pervasive Way to Serve the Unreached Community for Preventive Healthcare

Abstract

One billion people (15% of the world population) are unreached in terms of accessing to quality healthcare service. Insufficient healthcare facilities and unavailability of medical experts in rural areas are the two major reasons that kept the people unreached to healthcare services. Recent penetration of mobile phone and the unmet demand to basic healthcare services, remote health consultancy over mobile phone became popular in developing countries. In this paper, we introduce two such representative initiatives from Bangladesh and discuss the technical challenges they face to serve a remote patient. To solve these issues, we have prototyped a portable health clinic box with necessary diagnostic tools, we call it a "portable clinic" and a software tool, "GramHealth" for archiving and searching patients' past health records. We carried out experiments in three remote villages and in two commercial organizations in Bangladesh by collaborating with local organization to observe the local adoption of the technology. We also monitored the usability of the portable clinic and verified the functionality of "GramHealth". We display the qualitative analysis of the results obtained from the experiment. GramHealth DB has a unique combination of structured, semi-structured and un-structured data which can be considered as BigData. We have partly analyzed the data manually to find common set of rules to build a better clinical decision support. The model of analyzing the GramHealth BigData is also presented.

Predicting rural patients� use of eHealth through supervised machine learning algorithms: A study on Portable Health Clinic in Bangladesh (Preprint)

“…Portable Health Clinic (PHC) is an eHealth initiative, jointly developed by Kyushu University, Japan, and Grameen Communications, Bangladesh to provide affordable healthcare solutions to lowincome, low literate people living in remote and under-served communities in Bangladesh by using information and communication technologies [8], [9].…”

Affordable M2M enabled e-health using standard ban technology

“…PHC was introduced to reduce easily curable diseases [9]. It was prototyped as a portable-clinic box equipped with major diagnostic tools integrating a simple equation to categorize patients into four groups depending on the level of action or attention required.…”

Targeting Morbidity in Unreached Communities Using Portable Health Clinic System

“…The Portable Health Clinic (PHC) system was designed by Kyushu University and Grameen Communication's Global Communication Center (GCC) to be an affordable e-Health system solution for low-income subjects in unreached communities [8]- [10]. The back-end of the system consists of data servers and a medical call center.…”

“…The interface of the local sensor server is the same of that of the master sensor server. Therefore, sensor boxes can directly connect to the master sensor server by changing the configuration address [8]. Morbidity Stratification Algorithm: Morbidity is identified using a triage stratification algorithm.…”