Health Jam Seattle/Press
Press contact
Please direct all questions about the Health Jam and press information therein to Seth Woodworth.
Boilerplate
Feel free to use any of this material for press releases you're writing.
About OLPC
One Laptop per Child (OLPC) is a non-profit organization created to design, manufacture, and distribute laptops that are sufficiently inexpensive to provide every child in the world access to knowledge and modern forms of education. The rugged, Linux-based, mesh-networking-enabled, and power-efficient laptops have begun to be deployed to children by schools across the world on the basis of one laptop per child. OLPC is based on constructionist theories of learning pioneered by Seymour Papert and later Alan Kay, as well as the principles expressed in Nicholas Negroponte's Being Digital.
About OLPC Health
The Health group at OLPC is an interdisciplinary group working on medical-related projects associated with the XO, including software, hardware, and content. Health projects can be a local grassroots undertaking, a student group project, a pilot implementation, a global community creation-sprint weekend - we cut across geographic, disciplinary, and institutional boundaries to help all health-related OLPC work move forward. Our basic premise is that existing Healthcare infrastructure in the countries with XOs could be extended and supported by using the XO.
The Health group is working on three main areas: Content, Software and Hardware. In content, we are working with several Healthcare organizations that have already created basic health, sanitation, and dentistry education materials in several languages. Some of this material is printed, some digital, and we are working on converting it to easily displayable and translatable formats. In Software, we're working to create medical diagnostics transmission protocols to allow XOs to send data to remote doctors and specialists for analysis in real-time, while conversing with a patient who might be at home or unreachable in a remote area. In Hardware, we are attempting to design a $15 USD peripheral, connected to the XO Laptop by usb, that can take measurements from a variety of sensors (EKG, pulse oximeter, digital stethoscope, etc) at a higher resolution than currently offered by the analog-in port and bundle it up for transmission to remote doctors/specialists. Other projects along these lines are starting up, and new projects and participants are always welcome.
About OLPC Health Jams
This Health Jam is a 3-day project sprint experience that gives participants the tools, knowledge, and resources they need to begin - or continue - contributing to OLPC Health projects. A healthy dose of this is open work time with experts in technology, education, and public health floating around for ready consultation, but there will also be (attendee-run) tutorials on the side for folks who want to pick up new skills or teach others what they know.
Publicity materials
These are materials that can be used to promote the Jam - feel free to spread them around. For more materials that need to be created, see the list of graphic design we'd love help with and make a poster or two if you have spare time.
