Senior team project ‘09

These Ashesi seniors, Adwoa Osei-Pianim and Kofi Manful, adapted medical diagnostic software to run on local cell-phones, enabling rural health workers to bring specialized health services to remote areas.

The software, originally developed by a team led by MIT research fellow Don Yansen, allows nurses in the field to take pictures of patients with their cell phones, fill out a brief questionnaire, and send it to a doctor in the United States for diagnosis. The application was developed for skin diseases and has been extended for use in maternal health care, malaria control, and HIV/Aids programs.

The current project, which started in August this year, is expected to end in December 2009Unfortunately, the original software only works on a specific brand of mobile phone.

The Ashesi students, working with the Acting Chair of Ashesi’s Computer Science Department, Dr. Nathan Amanquah, modified the software using Java so it can work effectively on several models of Nokia phones used commonly in Ghana.

Over the past ten years, mobile phone networks have spread across the country and can be accessed in most communities. The hope is that the software will be used by community health nurses that work in remote locations across the country, improving diagnosis and treatment of patients that often have no access to doctors.

Update: Adding more functionality, from scratch (from Java to Python…)

Using the Python programming language, a new team of Ashesi students is now re-writing the software from scratch to get it to work effectively on a wider range of phones, including advanced smart phones on the Symbian platform, and to be less expensive to deploy in the field.

With Python, the software will be able to imbed the pictures of patients in a GPRS message, which significantly reduces the cost of data transfer and makes the program more sustainable. One of the challenges with the original software was the cost of sending picture data to doctors internationally.

The new team members are Joseph Amegatcher ’10, who spent three Christmas vacations as an Ashesi student volunteering in Ghana’s Upper West region, Hanan Yaro Boforo and Kanba Daniel Tapang.

Kofi-now a graduate- developed a love or service, and of efficiency, at Ashesi

A team member of the original telemedical project, Kofi Manful ’09, graduated Magna cum laude and works as an analyst programmer with Unibank Ghana’s Business Intelligence Unit. “My job, mainly, is to automate the bank’s manual processes so we can increase productivity”. Kofi, aside working with the bank, is involved in a number of community service projects.