Health meetings

  This page is part of the OLPC Health Project. Hardware | Software | Content | Health Jam

10 February 2008

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

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 Psychiatry, Behavioral Psychopharmacology Research Laboratory McLean Hospital & Harvard Medical School
14. Scott Swanson
15. Kevin Crews
16. Ian Daniher
17. Jennifer Deobeir
18. Mel Chua
19. Judy Stone
20. Drew Einhorn
21. Seth Woodworth
22. David Greisen
23. Frederick Grose
24. Erica Frank
25. Benjamin Mako Hill
26. Chip Truscon
27. Chris Paton
28. Larry "Gus" Landis

Minutes/Notes

Please make corrections as appropriate

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.

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.

I'm the Executive Director of Health Sciences Online, a portal where health professionals in training and practice access free, comprehensive, high quality, current courses, references, and other learning resources (current at around 20,000 learning objects) to improve global health. We have been working in collaboration with WHO, CDC, World Bank, and others. We don't build content but compile it.

For OLPC, we spent a couple months last summer gathering links that we believe would point to some very useful information for kids regarding their bodies and health. One can have a look at these by going to the Health Content subsection on the Health wiki page.

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

Erica Frank: The materials are under various licenses, retained by their authors/publishers -- we just spider what's out there.

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

Erica: Most of the material is in English, but translation tools are improving. You can already enter medical terms in 5 major languages and get results (primarily in English). If anyone wants to collaborate, they may please feel free to contact me at efrank at emory dot edu (efrank@emory.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'm also a paramedic, worked at 911 emergency response and now work for an aeromedical repatriation company that requires me to travel to field sites on short notice. I have been focusing on the Vision document on the wiki which some of you might have seen.

It's important to look at health projects from both a technological and social angle, in the same way that OLPC approaches international development education theory. Statements of principles analogous to those on the education side can be developed for our health projects. We must also keep in mind that general purpose communications and information processing tools will get used by folks to deal with whatever issues are most pressing in their lives. In resource-poor settings, this will mean tackling problems related to basic subsistence needs: health, food, water, etc... We must try to anticipate the many ways in which people will go about using such tools. Health should be considered a basic 'pillar' of development potential in OLPC, not simply another area of 'content'.

Chip Truscon: -corporate influence in the US, subversion of work, vision needed to protect interests of people

Anna Breshtyn: -flyers / messages -EMT, paramedic -MIT graduate student -trying to organize in terms of curating -folks with Hesperian 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.

I believe SJ also commented that use case scenarios such as the Mancora example on the Health/vision page, were valuable for designing solutions to match community needs. There was general agreement that many who volunteer have no first-hand experience with the target communities, and so it was agreed that it would be helpful to document use cases for a variety of communities where OLPC projects and XOs will be used (perhaps linking off the Case Study section). The use cases would help developers understand the community environment and resources available. --FGrose 22:27, 16 February 2008 (EST)

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:

WorldVistA is a free open source implementation of VistA, the software that runs US Veterans Administration's hospitals, outpatient clinics, and nursing homes.

• most info on wiki http://wiki.laptop.org/go/WorldVistA
• For an overview of VistA and its components see: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/VistA_Monograph
• For a list of organizations that have adopted VistA see: http://www.hardhats.org/adopters/vista_adopters.html
• For VA training for clinicians see: VeHU, VA eHealth University training website Select All Tracks, no Keywords and browse.

The VA removed this valuable site. It is partially back, but it's mostly just stubs. It remains to be seen if it will be fully restored.

Join the chorus asking the VA to put it back.

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 would be good to find examples in which OLPC test communities have already been using this tool for purposes beyond those originally imagined. Asked Harriett or Amit if they could 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 separate 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 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. 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

Arjun: Today's meetings aim was to get many people to get to know what work other groups are doing. More frequent meetings with smaller groups and more focused agendas would be the way to go.

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!)

=Professor and Canada Research Chair, University of British Columbia Department of Health Care and Epidemiology, and Department of Family Practice =Founder and Executive Director, Health Sciences Online =Founder and Principal Investigator, Healthy Doc = Healthy Patient =President, Physicians for Social Responsibility =Research Director, Annenberg Physician Training Program in Addiction Medicine =Professor and Senior Advisor, Preventive Medicine Residency Program Department of Family and Preventive Medicine, Emory Univ. School of Medicine =erica.frank@ubc.ca or efrank@emory.edu

Feb 21, 2008

Attended

• Mika Matsuzaki
• Arjun Sarwal
• SJ Klein
• Anna Breshtyn
• Lia Meisinger
• Benjamin Schwartz
• Josh Hehner (over IRC)

Minutes

_sj_> anna : I've been working with the hesperian foundation
<_sj_> it's being reformatted, and will ship as it is o nthe xo; some people including mea are rallying around the diea
<_sj_> of tweaking it so it's more interactive / geared towards children
<_sj_> my tack is we should be more specific about the mateiral we're requesting to see if there's stuff that's arleady child appropriate
<_sj_> and constructionist and interactive.  so I've tried to outline just what our reqiurements are.
<_sj_> asked for feedback at our next call; now want to make a beautiful flyer and meet with community artists to send out 
<_sj_> to get materials that are reight on the dot.
<_sj_> connected with leah through mark, a colleague; she's a physician, working on surgery issues specifically re childbirth.  not a topic I listed originally,
<_sj_> but there are so many things it would be so helpful to have in the 3d world, informatinaollly around the topic, things kids in the 3w face on a regular basis.
<_sj_> she's interested in doing an mph projet and contributing towards olpc it seems a fit for her ot cerate a module for us dealing with health of young children, childbirth, health of mothers, &c.
<_sj_> lea : things around childbirth, whether it's just distinguishing when they need to go get help
<_sj_> can make a big difference. theeres a great application here for working on some of that 
<_sj_> if you guys agree... it certainly seems like it could help a lot.
<_sj_> there's a lot of information that could be prsented that would be relatively approp, or at least not inapp , for shildren using the laptop.
<_sj_> especially in the dw
<_sj_> the kids are exposed to a lot of this in a very first-hand way
<_sj_> [In attendance : arjun s, mika m, anna b, lea, ben schwartz, sj]
<_sj_> ben s : we shouldn't worry about making things 'appropriate' - countries will choose what they want to use or not 
<_sj_> lea - so we want to make things genreally acceptable across the board
<_sj_> some things it isn't legal to teach in some countries
<_sj_> make things in sections so just those could be left out
<_sj_> ben : that would be [fine]
<_sj_> arjs : workflow to adopt t ostart off somewhere?
<arjs> talking about licensing issues when one makes a game or appication 
<arjs> off some material
<_sj_> one thing I really strongly believe in tfor shipping with the laptop is:
<_sj_> health is a unique topic compared to other educational topics that come with the laptop and shoudl e put at the forefront of things the laptop comes with
<_sj_> it wouldn't be enough to just be able to look things up 
<_sj_> b/c it's something kids face on a d2d basis
<_sj_> if they immediately can access the things important to them, that would be really valuable.  I don't know hwo that cna happen and still do justice to all the other features of the laptop.
<_sj_> [aside; anna has notes from a few mins when I was talking about how to have a reference library for ourselves while building free content for thers]
<_sj_> ben s : lte's work on noninteractive information first, to mkae people avaialble and get people working togethe and thinking about what exists and what needs to be made/found
<_sj_> before moving on to new interactive and game like and child-friendly materials
<_sj_> I see no problem with fully integratin ghealth int oall other bundled content. 
<_sj_> I dont' think yo ucan communicate much medical knwoeldge without text unless you want to conver everything into speech... 
<jhehner> comment from the peanut gallery: health needs to be a group of activities in addition to having health content
<_sj_> arjs : 3 things . 1, do we really wnat to project health info as seomthing critical?  do we want to provide that sort of life-savin information (and promote it as such)?
<_sj_> 2, we should have a health section for the library
<_sj_> 3, getting healht information across to the illiterate, thorugh pictures, text-to-speech, &c is very interesting.
<_sj_> [thx josh]
<_sj_> @josh: what sorts of activities do you have in mind?  
<_sj_> ben s : that sounds reasonable.  even in middle school we had some nice dissections
<_sj_>  there's a lot of medical biologicla content we could do 
<jhehner> comment from the peanut gallery: an example is public access defibrillators which start talking to you the moment you turn them on, and will literally teach you what to do with the device if you don't know what to do
<_sj_> sj : notes there is great frog-dissection program online
<_sj_> josh: scary
<_sj_> [josh:scary]*
<jhehner> (i'm not saying we do that.. its an example of an interactive device...
<_sj_> lea : you have to assume this will be used in all different ways, and for some pepole will be their only rsouce.
<jhehner> some PADs teach CPR, AR, etc... not just how to put the defib pads on
<_sj_> there can be information, not specially placd, but as long as people can access it veyr quickly, that could make a big differece to people.
<_sj_> interactive is a realm for kids to learn basic things;just having basic information available so they can learn by reading it, whether an emergency or not, out of an interest in medicine : either way, having it there as a resource for them could be very valuable.
<arjs> critical life saving information should be there on the XO
<arjs> but not necessarily the XO can be projected as a tool for that
<jhehner> comment from the peanut gallery: another thing the health group can be doing is pushing for the evolution of other XO activities in directions that will make them useful for health applications.. an example would be better teleconferencing, where you can pop up text, graphics, etc.. in parallel, maybe an API so that telemetry could be sent through
<_sj_> sj notes : we should avoid being a first publisher for material that impinges on life-threatening processes
<_sj_> [at some length]
<_sj_> lea : for issues such as cutting umbilical cords... and tetanus dangers... this seems like something that is useful prevention, not life threatening, but potentially saving.
<jhehner> _sj_: that's very unlikely to happen... no need to reinvent the wheel with any of the content, its all out there... hesperian books have lots on emergencies, for example
<_sj_> ben: it sounds as though you are talking of a component of a childbirth manual.  how to deliver a child safely, including proper severing of the umbilical cord.
<_sj_> jhehner, right.
<_sj_> lea : I'm just trying to clarify - if there are sources that teach these basic things and are out there, using as they are available is okay?
<jhehner> _sj_: hesperian books are also very good at repeatedly telling folks that they need to get more help for lots of the stuff they might be dealing with _if possible_... they make a good balance of providing help and info for folks dealing with situations where there really is no doctor, for example, while also being reference info for when there is one available
<jhehner> fine balance
<_sj_> josh, right
<_sj_> [noted on the call]
<_sj_> mika: are we making the distinction of things for families rather than for kids? 
<_sj_> some of this information may not be helpful for kids.
<_sj_> anna : one way I got involve was a specific case in thailand where they ended up working with a community where 
<_sj_> the children... the state had built wells to provide clean water 
<jhehner> if you look at the educational content, you can see that it is not stand alone info., but rather meant to populate a set of activities, or even larger than that, a whole process or educational infrastructure... in the health examples in my hypothetical case scenario, you'll see that health content plays the same role
<_sj_> and the children spearheaded the effort to rebiuld the wells where tehgroundwater would be better
<_sj_> they were really impressed and wanted to reach out to those kids who just needed access to information
<jhehner> it is used as part of a larger community health initiative process
<_sj_> [jhehner, right.  actually, if youcould write mor about that on the project pages...]
<_sj_> ben: i also think it's important that ... we have to do this odd thing to target anyone from 6 to 18.
<jhehner> _sj_: let me know if this is disruptive... don't mean to be confusing either this transcript or your phone convo
<_sj_> arjs : olpc has never been only about things for kids 6-16.
<jhehner> arjs: OLPC also repeated stresses that we underestimate what kids could do, and that therefor notions of 'age-appropriate' are different in this context
<arjs> jhehner, yes. absolutely true.
<jhehner> in any case, one might argue that childhood itself is not, beyond about age 5, actually about real developmental stages, but rather a process of extendd privilege... this privilege does not exist in most third-world setting...
<jhehner> hence kids working at age 8, taking care of kids at age 8, etc...
<jhehner> or the kids that anyone in development work has met that seem 'old beyond their years'
<jhehner> because of the crazy shit they have had to deal with...
<jhehner> _sj_: will do
<arjs> health content email id needed
<_sj_> we're talking about how to use rt, &c.
<jhehner> arjs: what's up with the health e-mail list?
<jhehner> or _sj_
<jhehner> just out of curiosity
<arjs> jhehner, request has been put to the new sysadmin at olpc
<arjs> jhehner, just giving him time to settle down :)
<jhehner> arjs: no worries
<_sj_> talking about health content submissions
<arjs> next steps
<arjs> 1. rt queue and ppl getting involved
<arjs> 2. reachout for content
<_sj_> ben notes that we should have standing contacts with orgs that, say, distribut ematerials to the third world
<_sj_> (sj agrees)
<_sj_> ben wants 'someone official' to contact these groups to make the connection
<_sj_> (sj and arjs think this is a dangerous mindset that must be rooted out imnmediately :)
<arjs> _sj_, please do it!
<_sj_> lea notes that seh wants to ask for materials from the peace corps,but doesn't want to piss off any higher ups by asking individual peace corps members for help
<jhehner> the auto show for which i've been the one-man paramedic all day is finally over for the night, so i'm heading home.. g'night folks
* jhehner has quit ()

March 16th, 2008

Agenda

• New participants in the project -- please welcome Nand, Tom Boonsori, Adesina
• Walter Humberto Curioso joins us as an adviser. About Walter, see http://faculty.washington.edu/wcurioso/
• Updates from Anna, Mika, Benjamin, Jennifer, Chris Leonard, Lia, Drew, ... (anyone else, please add)
• Is this a good time to start actively recruiting volunteers for health projects ?
• Health Jam!
• We need some sort of weekly boot-camp in which we can welcome new participants and help them get integrated into the workflow of Health projects
• What can we immediately deliver for the Peru deployment ?
• Volunteers needed for meeting minutes and meeting co-ordination and organization!

Meeting notes proposal

--FGrose 01:51, 13 March 2008 (EDT)

• In the spirit of collaboration, since we all listen selectively and best to that which most interests us, all attendees or listeners should submit their additions on this wiki page. The moderator may simply outline the content, and everyone else should sign their contribution with the --~~~~ signature.
• A few proposed guidelines:
  1. Report first a summary of the discussion topic (ideas actually aired). Sign this contribution. Others may edit or submit variations and clarifications of what they actually heard on the topic.
  2. Optionally, report enlargements (new ideas not actually aired) and opinions (that weren't aired) at an indented level below the base entry. Be sure to sign any such contributions.
  3. Focus on filling those gaps in the notes of topics that you find most significant and interesting.