Wednesday 14 September 2016

A mobile diagnostic and screening toolkit for urban slum settings

In July 2016 CATCH researchers in collaboration with Zuyd University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands and academic, healthcare and industrial organisations in India embarked on a project to support global challenge development activities, funded by EPSRC.
The project: “a mobile diagnostic and screening toolkit for urban slum settings” aims to outline the development of a multifunctional and modular diagnostic and screening toolkit that can be used in the urban slums of India and other low resource areas and be operated by non-medically trained people.
Urban slums are characterised by extreme poverty, challenging living conditions and limited access to health services. The need of such a toolkit lies in the experience of a large hospital in Bangalore (India) in their community health program that serves around 30 slum communities. The development of a diagnostic and screening mobile toolkit for relevant health issues can therefore play a great role in making healthcare available and accessible to slum dwellers, who usually do not have any access to health services.
The project is currently in its first phase which aims to identify common health issues in urban slum areas in Bangalore by gathering information from different sources including discussions and workshops. The second phase of the project will involve designing and developing a concept and a prototype of a mobile toolkit to perform a number of diagnostic and screening tests relevant to the health issues in urban slums.
Estimated to end in March 2017, the results of this project will help to develop a more exhaustive research plan that will include the actual development and testing of the toolkit and its embedding in daily care practice.  This project will be relevant to any setting where there is no or limited access to healthcare, as exist particularly in some areas of Africa, Asia and South America.

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