IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - Fall 2013 - 35

Fig. 2. Sample quarterly report using mHEALTH-PHC.

to formulate and fine tune the overall health policy.
The midwife at the Sub-center
provides preliminary healthcare
to pregnant women and performs
normal deliveries of babies. The
mHEALTH-PHC tool can aid the
midwife, as it can be integrated with
the portable battery operated medical test devices for blood and urine
analysis. This facilitates inclusion
of pathology test reports as part
of "patient medical history." The
midwife can record a voice query
through the interface available to
her. Wireless Internet makes it possible to upload a patient's personal
information and medical history to
the server. A web console gives an
integrated view of patient's medical history including the midwife's
voice comments about the patient's
illness and symptoms to the Center
doctor or Medical Officer.
Through the Doctor's Console,
the Center doctor (or Medical Officer) can see the patient's details
with medical history and listen to
the midwife's recorded voice query.
The doctor would then give his/her
advice in voice/text or may handwrite a message using an E-pen
as shown in fig. 3. The image of
the prescription is captured and

sent over wireless Internet to the
midwife's mobile phone and the
midwife can then take action
accordingly. If required, a specialist available at the rural hospital or in a city hospital could be
contacted over the Internet and
the entire case, including patient's
medical history, could be referred
through mHEALTH-PHC for
expert advice.
Thus, mHEALTH-PHC connects the social health activist in the
village, the midwife at the Sub-center, and doctors and medical officers at the Center, and if required,
doctors at a Rural Hospital or city
hospital, through wireless, Internet, and web technologies.

mHEALTH-PHC
Implementation
The main goal in implementing
mHEALTH-PHC is to deliver high
quality primary healthcare. Hence
a mechanism to audit and take corrective actions if required is built
in to the system. Considering the
low literacy level of village health
workers, we have provided the
user interface in local languages
using multi language text rendering
(MLTR) software. Entering large
amounts of text is avoided by using

IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

fALL 2013

voice input. By using a mobile
application, we have avoided
power related problems which were
some of the main causes of failure of computer-based systems in
the villages. Medical devices are
equipped with a battery that has a
reasonable capacity to work even in
the absence of electrical power.
Primary healthcare at an affordable price is another goal. To
achieve this, we have adopted a
"Software as a Service" (SaaS)
architecture. This ensures that all
hardware cost and maintenance
issues are handled centrally at the
data center, and support for the client software can be eventually handled by the multi-purpose worker
at the Sub-center, who would be
appropriately trained for this service. This training would also be
useful to serve the local community as well for other minor software and computer-related issues.

Overcoming the Challenges
Preliminary results from our field
trials indicate that the implementation of mHEALTH-PHC
has contributed significantly to
overcoming the challenges faced
by Primary Healthcare Centers as well as the community.
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - Fall 2013