How PDAs Are Saving Lives In Africa

Mark Goldberg writes "UN Dispatch, the United Nations affairs blog I write, just posted an item that may interest this community. Joel Selanikio, a medical doctor and technologist, writes to us from Zambia to relay how PDA devices are quietly revolutionizing public health services in sub-Saharan Africa. Selanikio runs a non-profit called DataDyne.org that trains local health officials to use PDAs equipped with an open source software tool to track outbreaks, coordinate vaccination efforts, and perform other vital public health tasks. So far, says Selanikio, the pilot program in Zambia has been a resounding success.

Unfortunate naming

[PresidentEnder]

Datadyne is the name of the evil corporation in Perfect Dark [wikipedia.org].

Fantastic

[COMON$]

This is great news, I have been peeking into ways to centralize information from third world countries mission projects. Our church here currently has a medical team that they send to haiti but there is an issue with creating a database to track individuals. Initially I was hoping to hook them up with access via a cell card in a laptop to a website running mySQL so that they could track prescriptions and individuals when they are back in the states.

This solution seems a bit more elegant with PDAs. Has anyone else worked on a project like this?

Where is it coming from.

[Anonymous Coward]

While it is good that things are being done about Africa. Who is providing this hardware to these people? if it is an American company/Government would the money not be better spent at home? The only way Africa is going to be saved is if someone starts businesses and gets these people off the streets and gets them some money and a way of life. Just handing someone something gets them nowhere. But time after time we send money to places like this and it just gets worse, or they end up spending it on guns and bombs and hating us 20 years later. Please quit sending aid, send jobs. You can mod me a troll if you want but you know I am right.

Re:Fantastic

[James McP]

About six years ago the engineering firm I work for had a public outreach program where high school students were given PDAs (Palm IIIx) to collect data on the storm and sanitary sewers along creeks. The kids would note which manholes were in the streams, where there were roof downspouts directly attached to the storm sewers, etc. Each manhole has their ID number stamped into the rim and the kids had paper maps as backup.

The data quality was spotty and the teenagers were pretty hard on the equipment but hey, they were teenagers. However the process as a whole was successful. There were virtually no complaints about the difficulty of data entry. Which is pretty encouraging since a non-programmer used a low-cost off-the-shelf PDA database to put it together. It would sync up with Access, which was good enough at the time. The kicker for most PDA data collectors is the sync process. It's worth it to pay someone for a decent data sync plug-in.

Today you should be able to do as well just as easily, if not better.