Harambe Rafiki!

Today we presented the Mashavu system to our first local client. No projector, no PowerPoint, no fancy equipment. We pitched a semesters worth of hard work in a crowded room with some chairs and two laptops to a local nun who is a certified nurse from Mweiga named Sister Purity who was accompanied by her partner Joseph, a community health worker who focuses on HIV/AIDS. Our two stakeholders arrived early in the morning to listen to our pitch. Sister Purity has been informed about the system but wanted to gain some more knowledge and actually see the equipment in action. The entire Mashavu team lined the room while the presenters scurried to organize the working demonstration. Aaron Fleishman, Julia Wittig, Mike Perone, and I gave a brief overview of the project as a whole and then showed Sister Purity and Joseph the functionality of the LabView software and the website that the doctors will be using for the diagnosis of cases. Mike demonstrated the thermometer on himself and then discussed the rest of the biomedical equipment.

Sister Purity provided our entire team with very insightful feedback after our somewhat informal presentation. She first talked about the issues dealing with maintenance of the biomedical devices and also raised concern about the people who will be operating the Mashavu kiosk and how they would be selected and trained. Sterilization was also a concern of Sister Purity. The questions and concerns that were presented to us were all valid and previously discussed while in development. Seeing these concerns while in Kenya made the whole team realize that the need for a high quality, sustainable, and usable system that we discussed in class were real. People were actually going to be relying on our work for their well-being.

Sister Purity then discussed our visit to Mweiga and how we will travel there next week to gauge interest in the system and community buy-in. The team will be preparing a working system that will take a patients vitals, input them into LabView, send the data to a doctor over the Internet, and receive a response to the case. While in Mweiga, measurements will be compared and benchmarked with out of the box devices that were brought with us including a thermometer, weighing scale, blood pressure monitor, and pulse rate monitor.

Before the test run on Wednesday, the biomedical devices must be polished and integration with the main kiosk software (LabView) must be configured. A dress rehearsal will happen this weekend to make sure the system works full circle.

Today the web development team learned the hard way that Khanjan was right; we needed to be prepared for anything and everything that could go wrong in Kenya. All of those lectures about things spiraling out of control on the ground were right. Laptops breaking, computer viruses spreading, and software crashing were things that can be easily handled back home but in Kenya these occurrences can make or break a project of this caliber. They are issues we are dealing with daily.

After the discussion with our stakeholders, the group split up. The Biomedical Engineering team collaborated and discussed some of the issues and concerns that Sister Purity brought up in her discussion. The team realized that there was a need for a high quality final product before going into production in Mweiga, so they went to work for the day testing and building the devices to specifications.

The other half of the team worked on community engagement and conducted surveys. We traveled outside the walls of CYEC and into the rural community. The team brought Rose and Abdalla from CYEC to translate and introduce us to some families in the community. We talked to several women, some of which had a number of children. Many of the women that we talked to did not work and lived with family nearby. Many of the mothers had husbands that worked at a nearby rock quarry. When asking the women about healthcare the answers were very similar, most of the community seemed to use the Nyeri General Hospital for their healthcare needs. The biggest hurdle for these families is getting to the hospital; it is about 5 kilometers away.

We found that this may be a great community to test the Mashavu system. Compared to yesterday, where most of the community members that we talked to were in extreme poverty and in very poor health, these families were better off. Many of them went to the doctor when they were sick and traveled there regularly for their children’s health needs. As a small business, Mashavu may flourish here. We will be visiting the same women again to discuss the actual project and how it could fit into their community and culture.

Today was very significant; we have our plans for community implementation in Mweiga and gathered an abundance of data from a very different demographic of people. We played with kids at the center, and came together as a group. The days are long but it is worthwhile. It seems that the project is starting to come together and there is a buzz going around the community. Mashavu is evolving into a real-world system that has the potential to change lives here in Kenya.

Blog Written By: Jimmy Mesta – Web Development Team

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