Development of user friendly software in bangla for a pc based rural health monitor with option for telemedicine

Abstract

Providing quality health service in rural areas is one of the major challenges for developing countries like Bangladesh. Even if infrastructures are provided, retaining qualified medical doctors in a village is almost impossible. The solution to this problem can be Telemedicine. Bangladesh has a good internet and mobile phone infrastructure spread almost all over the country which can be used to advantage. However, a proper telemedicine system requires PC connected digital diagnostic equipment at all rural centres. Importing such devices from the industrialized countries will be cost prohibitive. Besides, maintenance and repair will suffer contributing to frequent interruption of service. Looking towards a sustainable long term solution, our department at Dhaka University has already developed some basic diagnostic equipment the outputs of which are all digitized and interfaced to a PC. This includes, Stethoscope, X-ray viewer, Microscope, Colposcope and ECG (12 lead). Other information like temperature, blood pressure, weight, etc. of patients can be taken by a rural technician using low cost standard equipment and the operator can then type in the resulting values for integration with our telemedicine system. Necessary software was developed to integrate the diagnostic devices to the PC, to acquire and store the data into a PC at the rural centre and for transmission of relevant data over internet. For real time sound transmission we used Google Talk software which reproduced low frequency heart sounds well. Web based application was developed for our telemedicine solution. The purpose of this application is to maintain the whole system properly as its hub. Patient registration, request forwarding, patient acceptance, prescription preparation with mouse clicks using an updatable library of necessary phrases and drugs, report submission etc. can be done using this web based application. PHP and MySQL languages was used to develop this application. The goal of our task was to make it user friendly and appropriate for using in our rural areas. Graphical User Interface of both data acquisition software and web based application was developed in both English and Bangla languages. Bangla will make it easier for the rural operators to use it comfortably. The rural or semi-rural centres for telemedicine will be run by trained operators who will have basic knowledge and experience of using a PC. Operators will transmit data through internet to expert centres. Doctors from expert centre will talk to the patient and see the diagnostic test results, in real time if wanted. The doctor will finally provide a prescription, again through web based application.