HIV/AIDS

Mobile Phone Use Among Homeless People

May 29, 2008 | CorinneRamey

file under:
community voice mail, domestic violence, HIV/AIDS, homeless, voice mail

For 40,000 people a year across the U.S., voicemail is a lifeline. The Community Voice Mail (CVM) program, started in 1991, has helped provide over 40,000 homeless and low-income individuals each year with access to voicemail in 41 U.S. cities. For many CVM clients, their voicemail is their connection to a job, an apartment, and relationships with teachers, doctors, or social service agencies. (MobileActive wrote about CVM and similar programs here).

Mobile Games: Learning About AIDS by Playing Cricket with Condoms

May 10, 2008 | CorinneRamey

file under:
HIV/AIDS, india, millee, mobile games, zmq

In a mobile phone game in India, a cricket match is played between the teams Demons XI and Safety XI. A report about the game describes it as a “cricket-based game involving balls in the form of condoms, faithful partners, information on HIV and the symbolic AIDS red ribbon.” A team wins by avoiding “googlies and doosra balls - unsafe sex, infected blood transfusions, infected syringes and the company of bad friends.”

The game is part of a growing market of "edutainment" mobile phone games -- games that are designed to provide entertainment and be educational at the same time.

D-Tree International

file under:
africa, children, decision tree, disease, health, Health and Medicine, healthcare, HIV/AIDS, illness, mobile technology, PDA, treatment

operates in:
Tanzania

contact:

Every year, millions of children die from illnesses that in the developed world we would never dream of dying from. These include pneumonia, diahrrea, malaria and dehydration.

Many of these deaths occur because the illnesses are mis-diagnosed and therefore mis-treated. There is a serious shortage of doctors and nurses in rural, resource-poor settings around the world; meaning many children do not get seen in the clinic, and often the ones that do, do not receive high-quality care because of the lack of time and resources.

References / Past Projects

D-Tree is going to change the way healthcare is delivered in developing countries. We are dedicated to improving the quality of healthcare available to the world’s poor by using innovative technology to provide accurate and effective point-of-care diagnosis and treatment.

The goal of D-Tree is to significantly reduce the high rates of serious illness and premature death from preventable and treatable diseases worldwide. At the core of this approach is the development and use of treatment protocols for the most commonly diagnosed illnesses based on best field practices. The protocols will be programmed into inexpensive handheld computers for use by frontline health workers.

These devices will be augmented with a system of patient-held data cards with embedded computer chips that record individual medical information needed for diagnosis and treatment.

This system also allows health workers to collect information including type of visit, diagnosis, and prescribed treatment - information which can be stored in the device and later downloaded into a central database system to generate statistical data for evaluation, research, or surveillance.

Recent blog posts