Getting Ready for More Rounds of Testing

The Education team split up into a few groups for the day and accomplished many separate tasks. The business planning aspects of the education process involved more research on the feasibility and the desire for potential Mashavu kiosk owners and operators. Part of the Education team gathered about 50 people from the community to come to the CYEC for an afternoon of Mashavu testing tomorrow, but we expect to have about 200 subjects just by word-of-mouth advertisement. One woman even said that she’s keeping her two kids out of school tomorrow so they can all go to the Mashavu kiosk together! Each of the people coming to our kiosk will receive a notecard when they leave with their vital statistics acquired from our medical devices. Though we may again risk being mobbed by children craving sugar, it is likely that we will give out candy to the kids who have their measurements taken. As a prize for those who participate, the nurse at the CYEC has even agreed to give out de-worming medication as an added bonus to the patients testing out our system that she feels may need it. She apparently has a surplus…
Others in the Education team talked to doctors, many of whom were very interested in our work. The Nyeri General Hospital, a provincial hospital, allowed for our team to gather information from a large hospital. Patients in the hospital were separated by age, not malady, but even the young patients did value privacy. Contrary to our prior knowledge, the patients added that it did not matter whether their medical care was attended by a man or a woman. Older patients admitted that the wait time and cost were the most common reasons for not going to hospitals very often. Posted wait times ranged from 40 minutes to 14 days! One potential problem area that was encountered was that two women doctors said that they would not want to give advice on a patient without seeing them in person, especially since darker skin colors would make even pictures from a digital camera difficult to diagnose, mostly due to liability concerns. Two male doctors, however, agreed that even though the Mashavu system did not allow for face-to-face interaction, under circumstances where the patients would otherwise not receive medical care, it would be helpful to have such an additional mode of spread health benefits to underserved areas. The Education team also met with the medical supervisor of the hospital, who would like to help us contact other proponents of telemedicine in Kenya.

With another round of testing quickly approaching, the BioE team put in a focused effort on working out a few bugs in the spirometer, the stethoscope, and the blood pressure device. Without access to effective calibration techniques for a few of the medical devices, validation has become very tricky, and we are all having to employ some creative engineering approaches. One other area of concern has been surrounding how to sterilize some of the devices, particularly the commercial models, since some are made of cloth and thus are hard to soak in alcohol. Perhaps the best news of the day was that the baby weighing scale is now fully operational. If we’re lucky over the next couple days, we can even try it on a few small children rather than the water bottles we’ve been using due to the lack of readily available babies. While Maggie put the finishing touches on the baby scale, Stephanie worked with Peter on the spirometer, and Brittany continued to work on the coding for the blood pressure cuff. After a few hours of toiling with the stethoscope’s signal, Mike Fickes assisted my demonstrations as I educated some of the older students at the CYEC about how our medical devices work, what they do, and why they are important. We are hoping to have the students available as a great asset as we test our devices in the upcoming days, especially among those who do not speak English.

Khanjan, Patrick of the CYEC, and Anthony of the Web Development team traveled to Mweiga to line up the details for Wednesday’s Mashavu testing. They scouted out the approximate dimensions of the room and tables that we will have, our access to a power source, and a description of the region to which we are traveling. We will be spending our time outside for most of the day on a football field to take the data. We got approval from all necessary authorities, including chiefs and a man from the Ministry of Health in the South district of Nyeri. The rest of the Web Development team and the Kiosk team hung around the CYEC to finish formatting the site and work on networking and interfacing the system. During the upcoming experimental trials we will hope to obtain some valuable feedback from the test subjects, as well as from local nurses that will be present. All that remain for the website are a few finishing touches, so it will be ready to go very soon. Hopefully tomorrow’s preparation with the local community will be good practice for Wednesday.

Kwa herini,`
-Mike Perone, Bioengineering Team