Technology That Matters: IRD and ICT4D: Computer World

Interactive Alerts is a patient data collection and monitoring system that is RFID based. This system just placed first in the global NFC forum competition for the use of near field communication. We managed to sit down with the man of the hour: Omar Allawala, who is the Director of Information Technology at Interactive Research and Development. Omar has been a software engineer for almost 10 years. His industry experience includes working with Java and Open Source technologies among others. Much of his work has been conducted in the U.S where he resided until recently, when he moved back to Pakistan.

What are you tracking through this Interactive Alerts System you have developed here?At present, we are tracking pneumonia, sepsis and meningitis primarily since those were the parameters of our study but other diseases may be included.

What exactly do you all propose to achieve through the study?We are tracking the events during the first 2 years of a child's life. Pneumonia is considered one of the leading causes of death among infants and children under the age of 5 in Pakistan. This study proposes to follow the children through the first 18 months of their life to see if they contract pneumonia during that time. We are trying to isolate a particular strain of pneumonia (streptococcus pneumonia) so as to lay a foundation for a vaccine trial which will follow this study. The child who meets our age criteria is enrolled in the study and given the RFID bracelet at a participating vaccination center. This RFID will be used to track the child during the study period and the IDs assigned to these bracelets are automatically managed at the server end.

From this point onwards, whenever the mother takes the child to a participating general practitioners clinic, a partner hospital or a follow up visit at the vaccination center, the RFID is scanned using the Nokia 6131 phones which Nokia was generous enough to donate to us. This scan reads the patient ID and prompts the field worker or the clinician to select from a menu option and submit the data to our server application via GRPS where it's stored in a database.

When the server receives the data it also generates a SMS message and dispatches that to a mobile team standing by to respond to these events. The mobile team consists of a surveillance medical officer and a phlebotomist who then uses the information contained in the SMS to go to the clinics and provide further assistance to the patient. For instance the patient might require blood tests, x-rays or hospitalization and our team handles this and links the test IDs with the patient ID using the same phone based system. All this data can be viewed by our team in real time though a secure web interface so that we can keep track of the patient's progress. By using these phones and RFID, we are able to provide a low cost location independent solution.

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