What: Nicki Dell: Field Evaluation of a Camera-Based Mobile Health System in Low-Resource Settings

Please join us this week at Change as Nicki Dell presents findings from a field evaluation in Zimbabwe where her Android based diagnostic tool into was interoperated into the health services work flow.

The worldwide adoption of mobile devices presents an opportunity to build mobile systems to support health workers in low-resource settings. This paper presents an in-depth field evaluation of a mobile system that uses a smartphone’s built-in camera and computer vision to capture and analyze diagnostic tests for infectious diseases. We describe how health workers integrate the system into their daily clinical workflow and detail important differences in system usage between small clinics and large hospitals that could inform the design of future mobile health systems. We also describe a variety of strategies that health workers developed to overcome poor network connectivity and transmit data to a central database. Finally, we show strong agreement between our system’s computed diagnoses and trained health workers’ visual diagnoses, which suggests that our system could aid disease diagnosis in a variety of scenarios. Our findings will help to guide ministries of health and other stakeholders working to deploy mobile health systems in similar environments.

Nicki Dell is a final year PhD Candidate in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington in Seattle. Her research interests lie in human-computer interaction and mobile computing with a focus on designing and evaluating systems that improve the lives of underserved populations in low-income regions. Her PhD thesis focuses on the technical, user interaction and deployment challenges of integrating mobile, camera-based systems into resource-constrained environments. Nicki obtained a BS in Computer Science from the University of East Anglia (UK) in 2004 and an MS in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Washington in 2011. Nicki has won several awards and fellowships including a Graduate Facebook Fellowship and a Google Anita Borg Scholarship. She has completed internships at Microsoft Research in Redmond, USA and in Bangalore, India and has helped to organize the Change group at the University of Washington since 2011.