Your Only as Strong as your Weakest Link. . .

by Aaron on May 25th, 2009

Hujambo! When we arrived at CYEC early Saturday morning we quickly got to work by breaking up into our respective sub-teams: Web Development, Kiosk, Bio-Engineering, and Education. To begin, the Web Development team was busy formatting their system so that the interface is user-friendly and easy enough for the doctors to use. We didn’t run into any major problems today, thank God; however, there were some minor issues that we were not able to resolve… We have been dealing with internal mal-ware viruses within our network of computers, which has definitely been an issue for our team throughout our process of completing our system. Hakuna matata, your computers are safe from our wrongdoings

The Web Development team has been working diligently with the Kiosk team so that they can successfully implement their system and attain their goals for the project. The Kiosk team has been working hard to integrate the data received by the medical devices with the front-end interface used by the Web Development team. There is a lot of tedious work that Aaron has been doing in order to complete this task, mostly by utilizing LabView. The next step would be for him to successfully receive data from the medical devices, created by the BioE team, and store them into the respective fields in LabView. In order to do so, the BioE team must test all seven of their devices, and make sure they are working correctly.

The BioE team has begun setting up some of their devices to the computers for public testing. They set up three of their seven medical devices to laptops in the clinic, located at CYEC. The three devices that were set up were the pulse rate, thermometer, and the spirometer. The pulse rate device was monitored by Mike Perone and Mike Fickes. Their first patient was a CYEC child named Leah, who measured a 60 pulse. They later found out that the strap around the wrist was loose which is why she didn’t get an accurate reading (later tested 82). All patients afterwards were properly measured without any negative feedback. The second device that was tested today was the thermometer, used to retrieve the temperature from the indigenous members of CYEC. Maggie Slattery and Brittany Flaherty were the Mashavu members that conducted readings for this device. The final device that was used today was the spirometer; Stefanie Auf Der Mauer was in charge of this device. This device didn’t have any major problems throughout the day, and is ready for more testing in the near future.

We have gathered some results at the end of the day for the three devices that were tested on the children and staff of CYEC. As far as the spirometer goes, 13 patients were tested and they all enjoyed the process of getting tested, and had nothing but positive feedback. The second device that was tested was the thermometer. Half of the patients preferred the oral device, while the other half was more comfortable with the device that is placed under the arm. Of the 37 patients that were tested, Maggie observed a 0.7 average error with the home-made devices. They received great feedback and would like to decrease the reading time from 2 minutes in the future. The final device was the Pulse Rate device which was tested on an astounding 60 patients. This device is better for people with larger wrists, and has a very accurate measure reading. It’s a very tedious process when using this device because the sensor must be placed on a specific part of the wrist and the strap must be tight.

While a lot of us were busy in our working stations in CYEC, the education teams embarked on a journey to the neighboring villages. The purpose of this exhibition was to gather data on these natives and determine what their health status is; furthermore, what they do in case of healthcare emergencies. Most of the people we visited said that they are healthy; however, when we asked them about specific problems, they admitted to some health issues, including: diabetes, TB, high blood pressure, HIV/AIDS, and some minor coughing problems with the children. Unfortunately, the natives we visited said that those infected with HIV/AIDS were already dead, after being infected for a maximum 10-12 years. These people don’t go to the Nyeri General Hospital unless severely ill.

They talked to two natives that gave us great feedback regarding local healthcare issues. The first person was a retired nurse and former Chief Nursing Counselor, Mrs. Margaret Ngure. She says she would utilize the Mashavu station when set up, and is also interested in possibly purchasing our system once complete. She also told us that there is probably no local doctors that would help us out in provide medical advice for our patients unless they see them face-to-face. She continued to say, “…we won’t say no to anything new that is going to bring our community good.” Finally, she told us that the professional doctors in the general hospital have way too many patients to see each day, and some people wait for up to three hours to see a doctor for 10-15 minutes. The second person they met is a retired pharmacist Stanley Kagema. He says that he currently goes to a private hospital to get his blood pressure readings… He also was interested in looking at our materials for Mashavu and maybe helping us out in our endeavors for sustainable health solutions.

Sunday was a day of leisure for the Mashavu Core Team, in which we participated in our first official “football” match against the local CYEC kids. We were all using uniforms to differentiate the two teams, not that we couldn’t distinguish ourselves from them before… We participated in a legitimate game that had a referee and 45 minute halves. They had 3x the endurance as us, and we had double the amount of substitutes, which is probably why we put up a good match. At the end of the first half we were down 0-1, and not much was going on. The second half was a lot more exciting with 5 goals being scored by both teams. Cory and James Bock scored our lone two goals, which was very exciting since our whole team seemed to be depleted of energy after 90 minutes of intense exercise… The final result was 4-2 in favor of the CYEC kids, what a surprise, ha-ha. Although we lost, it was a respectful defeat, and our morale was sky high although we were covered in dirt and mud from the soccer field. We finished our night with a group of about 17 of us enjoying a delightful dinner at the “slaughterhouse” or butchery, where we enjoyed a bottomless pit of chicken and beef on chapatti (deep-fried tortilla) washed down with some Krest drinks (very popular ginger ale) – Wiki it for a more explicit explanation.

Thanks to everyone for reading our blog posts, we hope that these concise and precise abstracts fill the void from the lack of communication of our group. We enjoy any and all comments left on the blog, and your comments/thoughts/prayers are what motivate us to continue our academic endeavors and strive for sustainable health solutions here in Nyeri.

Lala salama. Asanate sana.

Blog written by,

Jonathan Sauer – Web Development Team