Health Jam Seattle/Results

Friday

Mel

• Small turnout, but really good people.
• Seth and I had a fantastic conversation with two UW health researchers before the Jam started; they were surprised more researchers didn't propose to use the XO for healthcare studies since it's a low-cost rugged computing platform, and commented that we do need a good way of gathering data (from OLPC Health hardware deployment - but also more generally from pilots in the education sense) that academics can use to study the impact of the things we're doing. Are machines available through the developers' program for them to see if some of their open-source public health software projects could work with the XO's hardware (particularly sensors/networking, which can't be done with emulation)?
• Reporter from the UW student newspaper came; there weren't many people for her to talk to, which I feel a little bad about - but we tried to give her a (very enthusiastic) overview of the project.
• World VistA people are here! I was introduced to the MUMPS programming language, which seems like a terse, powerful, (ugly) language for database manipulation. They want an interface written - it's currently in DELPHI and the only component of the medical-records management program that isn't open-source, and anything that can hook to a socket can work with it (so a pyGTK interface with python sockets would be great).
  • It IS open source. We have the source! The problem is that we do not have an open source compiler and library with which to compile and link this source. It is written in Borland Delphi, a proprietary dialect of Pascal, and uses their proprietary VCL (Visual Component Library). There is an open source Free Pascal/Lazarus project which is similar, but not 100% compatible, so there will be some porting required. We will see how much progress we make this weekend --Drew.einhorn 09:48, 19 April 2008 (EDT)

    Ah - sorry about that, Drew - and thanks for the correction! Mchua 11:46, 19 April 2008 (EDT)

Seth

• Small turnout, but not unexpected (Saturday should be much better)
• Excellent conversations with the World VistA team, discussing possible partnerships in promoting their MRD software further
• We just so happened to find a Biomedical Engineer who's very interested in working on the TeleHealth hardware.
• The department of Global Health is also interested in bringing in speakers on OLPC in healthcare for one of their large events coming up in July
• I think that we really blew the mind of the reporter from TheDaily (student newspaper) She ended up staying around for quite some time, and Mel and I ended up talking to her about FLOSS and Winning back the Commons, software freedom, etc. I think that we gave her way too much information for a 15 col in story.

Sethwoodworth 10:17, 19 April 2008 (EDT)