Activities

Major Research Projects consists of GramHealth, GramCar, GramAgri and GramWeb.

Research Topic

Develop an affordable and reliable Remote Healthcare System for Unreached Community.

Identified social problem

More than half of the world’s population do not receive all the essential services they need. 100 million people are pushed into extreme poverty due to their health expenditures, forcing them to survive on just $1.90 or less a day. Many of them live in areas where healthcare infrastructure (clinic, doctors etc.) is not available. They are deprived of health care facilities for several reasons:

a.Poor health care facilities exist in rural areas- due to the scarcity of hospitals and clinics and absence qualified doctors.
b.Urban health care facilities are out of reach- because, of long distance takes long time and effort to go- need extra money to travel rather than treatment and female denies to show male doctors in person.
c.Difficulties to access eHealth services- because village peoples’ inability to measure basic health problems and don't have the measurement tools.

Our Idea

We have prototyped “portable health clinic (PHC), a compact telehealth system with diagnostic equipment and GramHealth software for archiving and searching patients’ past health records. The back-end of the system consists of data servers and a medical call center. The front-end has the instances of portable briefcase consisting of medical sensors and measuring equipment operated by healthcare workers living in unreached communities.

1.Portable Health Clinic
2.Women Micro Entrepreneur
3.Personal Health Records
4.Telemedicine Center (Doctor’s call center)

Technical Challenges

1.Usability of the system considering low-literate and ageing community
2.Portability of the system considering the interoperability issues of many hospitals and clinics
3.Visualization of healthcare data for easy and error-free explanation to patients, doctors and family members
4.Consumer behavior of the remote healthcare systems
5.Analysis of healthcare BigData for knowledge discovery and to develop decision mechanism
6.Error detection of remote healthcare data
7.Social business models to maximize social impacts

Expected social impact

1.Reduce morbidity
2.Serve unreached community and ageing population

Target

Build a new car-sharing model for rural community and urban congested areas in developing countries.

Research topics

1.Design a car sharing algorithm to maximize the car usage and reduce idle time
2.Design a scheduling system for multiple number of social services (Healthcare, Education, Learning and Purchase)
3.Impact analysis of college bus service for female high school students

Expected social impact

1.Improve the mobility conditions of rural areas
2.Reduce congestions and environmental pollutions in urban areas

Target

Smart agriculture system to generate extra income for small farmers

Research topics

1.Design farmer-friendly communication tools: farmer to farmer, farmer to expert and farmer to business
2.Design and implement Farmer-friendly e-Commerce system
3.Design voice navigation system for uploading farming information
4.Quality monitoring system for healthy vegetables

Expected social impact

1.Generate extra income for farmers to reduce poverty
2.Provide healthy and safe vegetables to the consumers

Five Academic papers published
Five international conference presentations
One international conference
One award

For details (in preparation)