Building an E-health system for health awareness campaigns in poor areas

摘要

Appropriate e-services as well as revenue generation capabilities are key to the deployment and the sustainability for ICT installations in poor areas, particularly common in developing country. The area of e-Health is a promising area for e-services that are both important to the population in those areas and potentially of direct interest to National Health Organizations, which already spend money for Health campaigns there. This thesis focuses on the design, implementation, and full functional testing of HealthAware, an application that allows health organization to set up targeted awareness campaigns for poor areas. Requirements for such application are very specific, starting from the fact that the preparation of the campaign and its execution/consumption happen in two different environments from a technological and social point of view. Part of the research work done for this thesis was to make the above requirements explicit and then use them in the design. This phase of the research was facilitated by the fact that the thesis' work was executed within the context of the Siyakhula Living Lab (SLL; www.siyakhulaLL.org), which has accumulated multi-year experience of ICT deployment in such areas. As a result of the found requirements, HealthAware comprises two components, which are web-based, Java applications that run in a peer-to-peer fashion. The first component, the Dashboard, is used to create, manage, and publish information for conducting awareness campaigns or surveys. The second component, HealthMessenger, facilitates users' access to the campaigns or surveys that were created using the Dashboard. The HealthMessenger was designed to be hosted on TeleWeaver while the Dashboard is hosted independently of TeleWeaver and simply communicates with the HealthMessenger through webservices. TeleWeaver is an application integration platform developed within the SLL to host software applications for poor areas. Using a core service of TeleWeaver, the profile service, where all the users' defining elements are contained, campaigns and surveys can be easily and effectively targeted, for example to match specific demographics or geographic locations. Revenue generation is attained via the logging of the interactions of the target users in the communities with the applications in TeleWeaver, from which billing data is generated according to the specific contractual agreements with the National Health Organization. From a general point of view, HealthAware contributes to the concrete realizations of a bidirectional access channel between Health Organizations and users in poor communities, which not only allows the communication of appropriate content in both directions, but get 'monetized' and in so doing becomes a revenue generator.