Master Students digitize pharmaceutical management in Africa
The Master Students in Communcation Systems design has demonstrated their projects in the Forum building at school of ICT. One of the groups have worked with design and testing of a network infrastructure concept around lake Victoria in Africa and also creating of a drug management system for health care facilities in the area.
The Master students in Communication Systems have during the fall worked with projects in Communcation Systems Design and in the beginning of January it was time to demonstrate their projects.
One of the project groups have worked with a project called AGLARBI, African Great Lakes Rural Broadband Research Infrastructure. Their task has been to develop the ICT network around lake Victoria in Africa and they had three main goals.
– We have made contacts through partners that KTH have in Rwanda and Tanzania, in order to contact local communities that would be interested to participate in the project. We are also designing and testing a network infrastructure concept and additionally we have worked with an e-health service that is a drug management application, says Amy Skinner who have worked mostly with the network infrastrcture part of the project.
The drug management application is created to run on top of the network that the group has designed. It is made for health care facilities to keep track of their inventory and order new drugs faster and easier than today, as it usually is done by analogy.
– The health care facility can get an overview of their invetory in their client and make a new order which they send through an sms to a server, says Migual Sosa while he shows the client on an e-reader with Android.
The client is made in two versions. One for Android which communicates through sms and one web based client which communicates through http.
On the other side is the drug distribution center who recieves the orders. They have an administration client where they can watch recieved orders, create packages with ID-numbers and also create bar codes from the package ID.
– The packages are then sent to the health care centers with the bar codes on top of them. In order to know what is inside the package you use the scan feature in your e-reader application and scan the bar code. After about 15 seconds the information about the package content are then delivered from the server to your client and you can add it to your digital inventory, says Miguel Sosa.