Health meetings

2008 Feb. 10

Agenda

Various people will present perspectives and talk about the work that they've been doing ensuing a discussion on the same topic. The idea for this month's call is for various groups and people to connect each other, deciding next steps, fostering collaboration and giving focus to efforts.

After brief introductions, following are the people who will each speak for 5-10 minutes and lead a following discussion.

1. Anna Breshtyn -- Reaching out to educators to donate material; publicity drive; mechanism for integrating content that we get
2. Walter Bender -- One Laptop per Child, the project today and the road ahead.
3. Jim Hopper -- Thoughts from Web-based "brief assessment and motivational enhancement intervention" project, which Jim conceived and is directing for another non-profit (that serves men with histories of childhood sexual abuse)
4. Josh Hehner -- Vision for the Health initiative and parallelism with OLPC's educational focus
5. SJ Klein -- Content focussed on prevention and sanitation; organizing people and projects
6. Carla Gomez Monroy -- Health and Learning; perspectives from the implementations in Uruguay, Peru, Mongolia *
7. Amit Gognaa 'Perspectives from Khairat pilot project site near Mumbai, India' or Harriet Vidyasagar 'About OLPC Project launch at school near Bangalore,India and The Teacher Foundation association with OLPC Project'
8. Drew Einhorn -- World VistA on the XO. We are going to hit the highlights of the WorldVistA wiki page.
9. Erica Frank -- Describing her team's work on the development of a database of large number of links and the work required to take it forward
10. Roy Peterson -- Development of an Ultrasound imaging system around the XO at Philips
11. Seth Woodworth -- Volunteer recruiting, collaboration with PATH, making this sustainable
12. Scott Swanson -- EKG and other hardware peripheral development efforts at IMSA
13. Ian Daniher -- On co-ordinating health peripheral efforts; progress today and the road ahead

Minutes

Please make corrections as appropriate

Attendees

1. Mika Matsuzaki - Student at HPS, Harvard University
2. Arjun Sarwal - Intern at OLPC
3. Anna Breshtyn - MIT Graduate student
4. SJ Klein - Director of Community Content, OLPC
5. Walter Bender - President, Software and Content, OLPC
6. Amit Gognaa - OLPC India team, Mumbai, India
7. Harriet Vidyasagar - OLPC India team, Mumbai, India
8. Adam Holt - OLPC support Manager
9. Henry Hardy - OLPC system adminstrator
10. Andriani Ferti - Legal intern, OLPC
11. Nikki Lee - Olinc
12. Josh Hehner -
13. Jim Hopper - Instructor in Psychology, Department of Pschiatry,

Behavioral Psychopharmacology Research Laboratory McLean Hospita & Harvard Medical School

1. Scott Swanson
2. Kevin Crews
3. Ian Daniher
4. Jennifer Deobeir
5. Mel Chua
6. Judy Stone
7. Drew Einhorn
8. Seth Woodworth
9. David Greisen
10. Fredrick Grose
11. Erica Frank
12. Benjamin Mako Hill
13. Chip Truscon
14. Chris Paton
15. Larry "Gus" Landis

Walter Bender: I am Walter Bender and I've been involved with OLPC right from the very beginning. OLPC's focus has been to provide children tools for learning. Some people ask us that those kids don't have food to eat or water to drink, how are laptops going to be beneficial to them? The laptops are definitely no substitute for food or water. However education is one is aspect that these laptops hope to improve for kids in the developed and developing countries. Our aim is to maximize learning that happens with kids and these laptops. Its not about how many children, but the effectiveness of the learning , the learning that happens 24x7. Its not just about getting the price of the laptop down, but providing the laptop with the proper set of features; one of the main being equipping it with the right software and content structure.

The idea is not just one laptop per child, but one laptop per child,family, grandparent... Our expectation is the communities will adopt the laptop to serve beneficial purposes beyond the kids and their learning - and we'd be happy to see that happen. Be it them using it say as simply an e-book reader, or say just as a tool for data analysis.

The Health applications idea has definitely been in our minds since quite some time. One of my students, Vadim Gerasimov really explored this aspect on the themes of how low cost bio-sensor peripherals can be used in a fun engaging way for self monitoring. On similar lines, I think it'd really be helpful for people to think about this idea on the theme of learning.

<question by Josh Hehner, brief reply by Walter...>

Jim Hopper: I am currently involved in the development of web based interfaces. Our focus is to look into these themes in a way that is interactive. We are addressing domestic violence and sexual abuse. We have a team that we have put together for this, have a substantial bit of funding and are working with a non-profit organization that serves men with histories of childhood sexual abuse. We ... clinical research centers ....learn and motivation....learn.. My work in this and my involvement in this regard is what I bring to the OLPC-health project. The significance of the aftermath of trauma and the effects of child sexual abuse. There are several embedded issues in that case -- several multidimensional as well as medical related issues and the implications of seeking help. Our focus is to educate people on these issues.

Erica Frank: I have to leave early, so I'd like to briefly talk about the work that we've been doing. We have put together links that we believe would point to some very useful information. Once can have a look at these by going to Health Content subsection on the Health wiki page. We at HSO have been working in collaboration with WHO, CBC and have .... 20,000 electronic sources. We don't build content but compile it. One of the things that we are trying to do is to include search terms that one can use to search through the content databases.

David Greisen: What about the licensing aspects of the content ?

Erica Frank: The materials are under various licenses and not all are under the GPL license.In many cases they are retaining their copyrights and people have to turn to the authors of the content.

Chip Truscon?: How do you take care of the translations aspect ?

Erica: Most of the material is in English, but translation work is going on. In about 5 years time things should be translated? If anyone wants to collaborate, they may please feel free to contact me at efrank at emory dot edu

Josh Hehner: Hi I am Josh Hehner and I am Director of Community Medicine Programs for a Peruvian-Canadian charity called Para el Mundo (PaM). We work in northern Peru in the areas of community medicine, education and social services. I am a paramedic and my work often requires me to travel to field sites with a short notice. I have been focusing on the Vision document on the wiki which some of you might have had a look at, look at it from more than techno-social project it is important to think ways in many people will go about using such tools lot of parallelism in in underlying OLPC's vision principles for the educational side

Chip Truscon: -corporate influence in the US, subversion of work, vision needed reply by Josh

needs of people , like health are more fundamental and basic than others

-a question to Walter by Josh? Walter: community to manufacture the learning immune system of community large

Anna Breshtyn: -flyers / messages -EMT, paramedic -MIT graduate student -trying to organize in terms of curating -folks with Hisparian foundation -wiki structure -health portal -age-appropriate

She underlined the need to exactly identify the specifications and the need to be extraordinary clear about what the content should be. Regarding the need for appropriate content for the laptops, participants should have in mind that we are talking about access to elementary schools. Therefore, there is the need to review materials in terms of quality. SJ at this point suggested relevant projects like Howtopedia, which however refers to older ages, and Appropedia.

Josh Hehner pointed out the cases in which there is an emergency and you want to have this health-related information readily available.

Mika adds: -planning lunches and presentations at Harvard School of Public Health -question to everyone is to whether we should go ahead with mass recruiting of volunteers or whether we should

Judy Stone : -I think that it'd be better to have some sort of structure and projects before going on with recruiting -I will be able to connect you with some people whom I know

Drew Einhorn: -World VistA -most info on IRC Logs -Grand Indes also commented in the middle mentioning that most of the code is under GPL -Vista Monograph -EKG, pulse eximeter, thermometer, stethoscope Went over highlights of the wiki.laptop.org/go/WorldVistA

Realized it needs to be split into 2 pages. One for Library folks interested in Health Software Another for folks from the Develop list. WorldVistA is a free open source implementation of VistA, the software that runs US Veterans Administration's hospitals, outpatient clinics, and nursing homes.

For a list of organizations that have adopted VistA see: http://www.hardhats.org/adopters/vista_adopters.html

For an overview of VistA and its components see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/VistA_Monograph

For VA training for clinicians see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/WorldVistA#VeHU The are factions within the VA struggling over preserving/removing public access to these materials. Join the chorus asking for preservation!

Amit Gognaa and Harriett: -23 laptops pilot project at Khairat -kids using the laptop tool very effectively -have gotten familiar with the sharing aspects quite well now -the focus till now has been on the educational side - we should concentrate on health information

Harriett: pilot project at Bangalore -teachers association -nutrition and health would be good topics to explore -need for immunization is an area of health education for us to emphasize

Josh Hehner: -it is imperative to think of example in which that communities would be using this tool for other purposes too could u give any examples ? Amit: kids use it for learning during the classes but when they go home, they use it for recording sounds and songs from the TV and sharing with others Arjun adds: The parents are very excited to read the local Marathi newspapers

Jennifer Deboer: -Vanderbilt University -Prevention and Intervention groups -Funding for OLPC laptops -conducting a randomized field experiment -requests health content contribution list such as health-content-contrib@lists.laptop.org - general discussion, desire a general health@lists.laptop.org list I am at the education school at Vanderbilt University, studying international education policy management. Our medical center has an organization called the Institute for Global Health, which has affiliates in a number of countries and works with the local community on health-related projects. The group that works with Mozambique has an established network in one of the rural regions of the country. We are working to construct an intervention to go on the XOs that would be a health education program addressing HIV/AIDS and hygiene/infectious disease prevention. We would like to then conduct a randomized field trial to investigate the effect of the intervention on students attitudes and awareness of these issues. Further, we would like to also design the research so as to also discern the differing effects of teacher training on the laptops or different formats for the intervention. Right now, our main goals are to create an appropriate intervention and to find the funding for the machines and the research, so I would love to work with anyone who is interested on either of these necessary items.

Ian Daniher: -health peripherals co-ordinator -working on EKG, thermometer -funding is an issue -

Seth Woodworth: -Health illustrations and photographs -wiki restructuring -need well defined tasks for people to do David Greisen: <comment about health content> -Seth and some other people have been actively restructuring the wiki pages

-can we have a seperate mailing list -a tab on the left pane of the wiki page

Josh: how key is this to OLPC's efforts ?Can we put it on the main wiki page ? SJ: -definitely a key issue -no need to wait for OLPC to think about it and decide to make it a key issue or not -put it up on the main page to let people know this is what we've been thinking about

Seth: -sound quality not good, need to have meetings with smaller groups with more specific agendas -maybe meetings on IRC

Bios

Jennifer DeBoer: I am a doctoral student in International Education Policy Management at Vanderbilt University. My research interests include innovation, engineering, and technology, especially for education and development.

wiki username: jumpbean (working on my website!)