Life-Saving Androids

Release Date: Mar 05, 2009

A group of H. John Heinz III College Information Systems Management students are working on a project with life-saving implications.

Using Google’s Android mobile development platform, the students are developing a software application for ClickDiagnostics, Inc., a global tele-health company headquartered in Cambridge, MA. The application will facilitate the remote diagnosis of diseases in developing countries.

ClickDiagnostics already enables community health workers in remote areas of the world to provide medical consultation and gather health data via mobile phones. But Ting Shih, co-founder and vice president of services development and planning for ClickDiagnostics and a 2004 graduate of Heinz College’s Information Technology program, said the company’s existing mobile platform is ready for expansion.

“The Heinz students are providing a revamped platform that will allow us to add many more services than we can with the current system,” Shih said.

Using the existing ClickDiagnostics system, health workers submit photographs and symptoms via cell phones to a dedicated server where the information can be accessed by doctors using the Internet to provide consultation.

“In some of these countries, there might be one doctor for 10,000 people, or it might take a day or more of expensive and dangerous travel to reach any doctor at all,” said Shih. “We're extending the reach of these medical specialists in ways that would otherwise be impossible.”

The Heinz College team is taking advantage of the Android development platform to provide a more robust and effective experience for health workers. Using technologies such as XML, XPath, Java and MySQL, the students are creating a step-by-step process that will simplify the identification of various ailments.

“We’ve been developing our own data schema that will allow physicians to capture a lot of information they weren’t capturing before,” said Steve Young, project manager for the Heinz team. “Our platform will allow a whole lot more clinical information to be input.”

Besides Young, the team working on the ClickDiagnostics project also includes Richard Catacora, Shuchi Muley and Udayan Pratap. All of the students are in the Information Systems Management program with May 2009 expected graduation dates.

Shih has worked with Heinz College students on several occasions and will continue to do so, she said.

“I know they do great work, and they're really dedicated,” said Shih. “What these students are doing could literally save thousands if not millions of lives.”

Watch a video highlighting Click's work in Botswana.

Photo (left to right): Steve Young, Shuchi Muley, Udayan Pratap and Richard Catacora

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