Project RundownICT4D

Project

Literacy Neutral Family Planning Tool

Literacy Neutral Family Planning ToolProject Overview

The rapid population growth in many developing nations has been attributed to the poor knowledge on family planning among women. In many parts of the world the subject has been considered taboo and sensitive because of cultural reasons.

A testable prototype for an intuitive, literacy-neutral, audio and video based mobile family planning information service was designed. The mobile service addresses the challenge women, especially non-literate women, face in accessing family planning information to educate themselves.

Funding and Partners

The project was funded by TEKES, a public Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation and Department of Biotechnology (DBT), Govt. of India. Project was jointly executed in partnership with M4ID, Finland.

Literacy Neutral Family Planning ToolThe service enables a woman to:

● access image, audio and video guided information on family planning and contraceptive methods in the click of a button.

● freely educate themselves at their own discretion

● record and send questions to Community Health Workers (CHW) who respond to the sender via a recorded message

● follow CHWs for information updates on the services provided

● scan a picture within a family planning brochure using the phone’s camera, to automatically retrieve audio/video content relating to the topic depicted by the picture

Literacy Neutral Family Planning Tool

ProjectUN Women’s Wi-Net

UN Women’s Wi-NetProject Overview

India has witnessed the world’s largest experiment in grassroots local democracy with a third tier of governance – Panchayati Raj Institutions (Village Councils) and urban local bodies. With one-third of the seats in these village councils reserved for women, the need to promote political leadership and governance among women has become critical. The project aims to empower women elected representative to make public policy and resource allocation patterns that are responsive to women’s human rights.

The Wi-Net platform was designed after extensive field research and focus group discussions, to address the needs of women’s political empowerment. Using the Wi-Net platform, women elected representatives could network with one another to share knowledge and learn from each other’s experience, much like today’s social networks, but with a minimal learning curve.

UN Women’s Wi-NetFunding

The project was funded by UN Women’s Regional Center of Excellence (RCoE), an UN organization dedicated to gender equality and the empowerment of women.

Execution and Impact

The Wi-Net platform was deployed in Mehabhoob Nagar District in Andra Pradesh with the active involvement of the local Zila Parishad (Block Development Office) in Oct, 2012. The platform provided deep insights into the needs of the women representatives and how they interacted with the platform to both communicate this need and to learn from peers. The learnings from this project were to play a crucial role in the design and development of future mobile-based services that addressed the needs of a gender responsive governance in other south-east asian countries that the UN Women focussed on. During the 4 months when the platform was tested, there were over 1500+ exchanges of information and queries among the selected 30 women elected representatives and other stakeholders within the project.

UN Women’s Wi-NetThe Win-Net platform enables the women elected representatives to:

● use the visual and intuitive mobile app to network with one another to improve governance

● ask questions and seek answers from peers and other stakeholders such as the UN Women or Zila Parishad office

● share their knowledge in the form of audio, video or picture content with others on the platform

● use the ‘tagging’ capabilities to categorize the content that they share, making the discovery of such content easy

● gain knowledge by consuming content that others share within their network

Project

Pink Army

Pink ArmyProject Overview

Maternal health has emerged to become the de facto focus area of many public health programs initiated by both public and private entities. The District of Sabarkantha in Gujarat is no stranger to such intervention programs. The district has a fairly large group of Anganwadi (grassroot health worker) and ASHAs who are constantly improving the lives of women and families in their community by offering key preventive health services. While the health workers face many challenges such as lack of quality health content or lack of necessary support system for knowledge upgradation; the administration faces far larger problems pertaining to training of the health workers and tracking and monitoring their performance to improve the effectiveness of the health workers.

Project ‘Pink Army’ intends to support these frontline health workers by giving them a mobile based tool that puts a wealth of vernacular maternal health information in their hands. The interactive health content covers a range of topics - from infant and adolescent health to pre or postnatal health. As the health workers use the tool in their everyday discussions and meetings with women in their communities, the administration is able to track and monitor their activity, using a web based dashboard, to draw valuable insights from them.

Pink ArmyPartners

The project is supported by District of Sabarkantha, Gujarat. Namaste Life (NGO) with their vast experience in the public health domain has been a valuable content partner. They were instrumental in mapping the topical areas and in creating the interactive content.

Pilot and Scaling

The Pink Army mobile tool was launched by the Honorable Chief Minister of Gujarat in Jan, 2014. A small group of health workers have been chosen by the district Zila Parishad (Block Development Center) to closely study the impact of the mobile tool and to obtain feedback on it from all the various stakeholders. The project is expected to be scaled to a hundred health workers within the district.

The mobile tool enables Health Workers (HW) to The service enables the administration to

● disseminate maternal health information to beneficiaries on the ground

● enhance knowledge on new and old health topics through continuing education

● experience the gamification within the app to compete with oneself for improvement and leveling up

● report a geo-tagged health case to the health center by quickly taking a photo of the patient or their health condition and adding a brief comment on it

● engage with their audience using the interactive quiz that is available for each health topic

● track and monitor performance of Health workers

● push new health content to the health workers

● assess the popularity of each health topic among beneficiaries based on insights

● allocate monetary and non-monetory incentives to HW’s based on their performance

● scale training efforts by making health content available to the HW

● obtain reports submitted by HWs in real time and take necessary action to deliver care

● effectively plan their health interventions based on data collected to improve healthcare at the ground level

Pink Army

Pink Army

Project

Physician Collaboration Platform

Physician Collaboration Platform Project Overview

Case discussions and collaborations are a common phenomenon in the physicians world. Complex cases are often solved by joint brainstorming sessions. The digital world today offers an unique opportunity for physicians to collaborate across borders. However, the current platforms of collaboration used by physicians like Whatsapp, Facebook and others have several technical limitations and major privacy issues.

WA case discussion platform was built with an extensive focus on the needs of the orthopedic physician community. The platform enables physicians to tap into the collective intelligence of the orthopedic community to understand and solve complex as well as odd cases. Using the platform, physicians can discuss cases by sharing x-ray images, archive solved cases and obtain peer reviews/inputs on specific cases.

Partners

The project was built exclusively for Uttar Pradesh Orthopedic Association (UPOA) and sponsored by Mankind Pharmaceuticals.

Physician Collaboration Platform

Project

Farmer Advisory System

Project Overview

With every new crop or crop variety a farmer faces the challenge of understanding the package of practices associated with the crop. While the yield greatly depends on how religiously a farmer has adhered to the package of practices, many farmers fail to achieve the yield as they struggle understanding and interpreting the proposed best practices.

This project aims to help farmers improve their yield by providing accurate, timely and highly personalized advisory. Through a simple and intuitive user interface (UI) that requires minimal literacy levels, a farmer can provide basic information about the crop under plantation and the start of plantation. Based on these inputs, a crop calendar kicks into place and the farmer begins to receive periodic calls giving him the necessary advisory in the form of audio/video content.

Partners

The project was developed under the guidance of Indian Agriculture Research Institute (IARI).

Farmer Advisory System

Innovation and Research

The project received immense praise for its service design that makes innovative use of SD cards and call simulations. The periodic calls received by the farmer aren’t real calls emerging from the telecom provider but rather simulated calls that originate from within the app that is running in the background. Further more, by completely removing the dependence on a telecom provider, the app functions even when no network is available and the simulated calls come with zero cost.

The app was also designed after extensive behavioral study of illiterate and semi-literate farmers and how they used their mobile devices. The project also considered factors such as poor network connectivity, frugality, lack of knowledge on data connectivity, wide presence of feature phones among farmers and their limitations, etc before arriving at an optimal service design.

Farmer Advisory System

Project

National Health Portal (NHP)

Project Overview

The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Government of India has set up the National Health Portal in pursuance to the decisions of the National Knowledge Commission, to provide healthcare related information to the citizens of India and to serve as a single point of access for consolidated health information. The National Health Portal will achieve the above vision by collecting, verifying and disseminating health and health care delivery services related information for all citizens of India.

The NHP mobile app acts as a mobile extension to the National Health Portal Project. The app features an intuitive UI that makes the access and discovery of health information easy for the rural audience who are predominantly illiterate or semi-literate. This health information service is planned to be deployed in the panchayats that have recently been connected by broadband by the GoI. The solution has been built to work on kiosks as well which can be stationed in various health centers at rural areas. Apart from making health information accessible, the app also suggests the name, location, route and contact information of nearby hospitals to the user, based on his/her current location.

National Health Portal

Project

MANCH - Community Media

MANCH - Community MediaProject OverviewMANCH is a Hindi word that translates as ‘platform’ or ‘forum’. Community Media MANCH is a platform for community media practitioners. It is a platform that will enable community media practitioners across regions to Share, Collaborate and learn from each others’ practice of content creation, community engagement, use of technology, self governance and evaluation and share knowledge about many other aspects of their work.

The mobile app designed and developed for the MANCH platform, interfaces into an existing web based system and supports sharing of audio, video, texts and image content by enabling community media groups to apply a range of creative commons licenses to indicate how they would like their content to be used. The platform aims to assist community media groups to enhance their capacity through productive collaborations with their peers.

MANCH - Community MediaThe app enables the registered community members to:

● create and share audio, video, image and textual content

● categorize content based on filters like region, language, indicate sharing permission, topic, etc

● search for media files uploaded by other members of the community based on specific filters

● browse media files shared by self over time

About MixORGAs a full service digital media agency, MixORG helps organisations and brands to achieve more by providing strategic, creative and technical expertise to harness the transformative potential of today’s digital landscape.

MixORG can provide services that cut across the digital spectrum. Our modus operandi is to understand every aspect of your business and subsequently align our activities to help you achieve your goals. We strive to ensure that our clients create a substantial revenue stream that is purely driven by this digital transformation.

In close collaboration with its sister concern Mobile Harvest, MixORG has executed several projects in the ICT4D space. The company has vast experience in research and design of technology interventions for rural development, health care, governance, community development etc.

MixORG offers services in the following domainsSocial Media | ICT4D | Cyber Security | Healthcare IT | Mobile | Web

Awards & Recognition ● DST - Lockheed Martin's India Innovation Growth Program (IIGP) 2013 - Top 10 Innovations in India

● Innovative Startups Showcase ‘13 - TiE's India Internet Day - Top 3 Startups

● Rio Earth Summit - Life Apps Documentary Series - TvE and Al-Jazeera

● Lufthansa's Runway to Success ‘13 - Top 10 Startups

● TATA Social Enterprise Challenge 2013 - 2014 - Top 10 Social Enterprise

● Conquest ‘13 - International Startup Conclave - Top 10 Startups

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