Hurricane Impact on Emergency Services and Use of Telehealth to Support Prehospital Care

The impact of hurricanes on emergency services is well-known. Recent history demonstrates the need for prehospital and emergency department coordination to serve communities during evacuation, storm duration, and cleanup. The use of telehealth applications may enhance this coordination while lessening the impact on health-care systems. These applications can address triage, stabilization, and diversion and may be provided in collaboration with state and local emergency management operations through various shelters, as well as during other emergency medical responses

Role of Information Technology in Policy Implementation of Maternal Health Benefits in India

Fifty thousand women died during childbirth in India in 2013, the highest total in the world; that is, one maternal death every 10 minutes. India and Nigeria account for almost one-third of total global maternal deaths. In pursuit of the Millennium Development Goals, the government of India directed efforts to improve maternal health and was able to reduce maternal mortality rate from 437 per 100,000 live births in 1990 to 140 per 100,000 in 2015, albeit missing the target of 109. Moreover, estimates for maternal morbidity are three to four times that of the mortality rates with even more pronounced regional disparities. Universal access to free public healthcare for maternal health has been a national goal since 2005, but its quality of service and utilization rate of maternal healthcare remains an elusive dream for many of the rural women even after a decade of substantial efforts. In a stark contrast, mobile technology has become more pervasive than the most basic infrastructure across the world. There are over 7 billion mobile phones subscriptions worldwide, but only 4.5 billion people have access to basic sanitation facilities, implying more people have access to mobile phones than toilets in the world, including India. The ubiquity of mobile phones can no longer be ignored. According to the 2011 census of India, 47 percent of the rural households owned mobile phones, and mobile phone network coverage spanned over 99 percent of the rural landscape, but only 31 percent of these rural households had a toilet. This exponential growth in mobile phone ownerships and adaptation has captured the imagination of academic scholars, public administration and the private sector to push for mobile based solutions and services in almost every aspect of public, social and personal life. M-governance has gained prominence too, aimed at improving service delivery, transparency, policy monitoring, public engagement, combatting corruption and poverty, especially in the developing world, leap-frogging poor-resource and low-income constraints. Today there is a mobile app for everything and the solution to any problem is a mobile app, including maternal health. However, amidst this optimism, it is surprising that the potential of mobile phones to improve social policy awareness is yet to be fully exploited. There are initiatives toward health literacy and mobile based cash transfers but few initiatives are geared toward improving awareness of social welfare policies, informing people about eligibility, enrollment and entitlements. Here lies the uniqueness of this research. Motivated to find solutions to actual policy implementation problems in practice, this research lies at the intersection of information communication technology, maternal health benefit policies and public management. In India, low maternal health benefits policy awareness imposes an administrative burden on rural women and leads to uptake of cash and public health service benefits. This research explores if mobile phones can be used as an effective medium to increase maternal health benefit awareness; thereby increasing the claiming of benefits. Using mixed methods of research, insights are drawn from a longitudinal case study in Melghat, a tribal belt of Amravati District in Maharashtra, India; a region that suffers from high maternal morbidity and high infant mortality rate. Forty-two percent of total childbirths take place in the home despite four different maternal benefit policies promoting institutional delivery and safe motherhood. In this dissertation, customized audio messages about maternal healthcare benefit policies were designed and broadcasted to 82 pregnant tribal women and followed up with qualitative interviews to examine any improvements in claiming of the policy benefits in 2013. The research provided an in-depth view of how information was disseminated through mobiles phones, and what factors and trade-offs, beyond information, were actually considered by the households in claiming the policy benefits. This research offers four contributions. First, it provides a deeper understanding of maternal health policies, how incentives work and the impact of conditions attached to these incentives, providing a plausible explanation for why the policies remain only partially effective. Second, in an era of m-governance, it illuminates the potential and limitations of the mobile phones in policy implementation and civic engagement, through a gendered lens. Third, it yields a caution to the technological optimistic use of mobile phones. By evaluating the causal mechanism of whether and how information awareness led to greater claiming of benefits, the findings revealed that information awareness alone was insufficient to improve claims when there were structural and systemic deficiencies in the policy design and management. Fourth, it advances the theory of administrative burden, by using mobile phones to reduce learning costs and by expanding the concepts of compliance costs and psychological costs, and highlights the relative interaction and trade-offs between components of administrative burden in an international context. The research concludes that although mobile phones have the potential to trigger demand for policy benefits and public engagement, and reduce learning cost, they are not the “silver bullet” because they cannot bypass the fundamental challenges of other administrative burdens, policy design deficiencies and bureaucratic processes

Philippine Urban Squatter Resettlement: Design for a Health Clinic

This doctor of architecture project proposes an approach to locate decentralized community health clinics, and proposes a design for a prototypical clinic to replace the existing Southville health clinic. This clinic is located in the Southville Relocation Project, where the government relocated railway urban squatters from Manila to Cabuyao. Through interviews, case studies, and literature research, this health clinic proposes innovative use of local materials. This project researches the culture and healthcare needs of this low-income population to determine the spaces needed in the health clinic. It examines the problems of the physical environment and infrastructure of the relocation project, the necessity of healthcare, and analyzes the Southville area for the proper sites for the decentralized health clinics. A site is chosen within the area, and this site is further analysed for sustainable design potentials. The health clinic addresses the residents’ immediate healthcare needs by providing better facilities to diagnose, treat, and prevent health problems caused by their resettlement. Traditional medicine practices are explored and incorporated into the spaces needed for the facilities. The prevention of health problems in the community will allow the residents to focus on re¬building their lives in Cabuyao. This health clinic will be properly located and designed according to the site and the needs of the people. It is expected to be a better facility than the current health clinic located in the Southville Relocation Project

Challenges and Prospective of AI and 5G-Enabled Technologies in Emerging Applications during the Pandemic

5G is being implemented in the Internet of things (IoT) era. This book chapter focuses on 5G technology and the integration of other digital technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, IoT, big data analytics, cloud computing, robotics, and other digital platforms into new healthcare applications. Now, the healthcare industry is implementing 5G-enabled technology to improve health services, medical research, quality of life, and medical professionals’ and patients’ experiences everywhere, at any time. Technology can facilitate faster medical research progress and better clinical and social services management. Furthermore, AI approaches with 5G connectivity may be able to combat the epidemic challenges with minimal resources. This book chapter underlines how 5G technology is growing to address epidemic concerns. The study highlights many technical issues and future developments for creating 5G-powered healthcare solutions. This chapter also addresses the key challenges AI and 5G technology face in emerging healthcare solutions. In addition, this book chapter highlights perspective, policy recommendations, and future research directions of AI and 5G-enabled technologies in confronting future pandemics. More research will be incorporated into future projects, including studies on developing a digital society based on 5G technology in healthcare emergencies

Telemedicine

Telemedicine is a rapidly evolving field as new technologies are implemented for example for the development of wireless sensors, quality data transmission. Using the Internet applications such as counseling, clinical consultation support and home care monitoring and management are more and more realized, which improves access to high level medical care in underserved areas. The 23 chapters of this book present manifold examples of telemedicine treating both theoretical and practical foundations and application scenarios

Patents and Mobile Devices in India: An Empirical Survey

Though India has the second-largest wireless subscriber base in the world, with more than 150 domestic mobile device vendors, it has, until recently, remained relatively unaffected by the global smartphone wars. Over the past few years, however, a growing number of patent enforcement actions have been brought by multinational firms against domestic Indian producers. These actions, which have largely resulted in judgments favoring foreign patent holders, have given rise to a variety of proposals for addressing this situation. In order to assess the potential impact of patents on the mobile device market in India, and to assist policy makers in formulating and implementing regulations affecting this market, we have conducted the first comprehensive academic study of the patent landscape of the mobile device sector in India. The results of this study illuminate a number of important features of the Indian mobile device market, including the overwhelming prevalence of foreign patent holders, the rate at which foreign and domestic firms are obtaining patents, and how these patent holdings are likely to shape industrial dynamics in the Indian market for mobile devices, as well as the availability of low-cost mobile devices that can significantly enhance public health, agriculture, safety, and economic development throughout India

Digital Transformation in Healthcare

This book presents a collection of papers revealing the impact of advanced computation and instrumentation on healthcare. It highlights the increasing global trend driving innovation for a new era of multifunctional technologies for personalized digital healthcare. Moreover, it highlights that contemporary research on healthcare is performed on a multidisciplinary basis comprising computational engineering, biomedicine, biomedical engineering, electronic engineering, and automation engineering, among other areas