Device and app can help save lives
Drinking contaminated water is one of the causes of dysentery, typhoid, cholera and various intestinal diseases that adversely affect the health, and in many cases, claim the lives of countless Filipinos.
This real-world problem was the inspiration behind a group of students who won the grand prize in the recently concluded #thinkOPENhealth: Hackathon for Health, held at the Asian Institute of Management in Makati City.
Team Quantum Hackers, composed of physics students from the University of the Philippines in Diliman, created a mobile device and app that analyzes water quality, besting 20 other teams of information technology professionals and students as well as health professionals at the 24- hour hackathon organized by PLDT wireless unit Smart Communications ( Smart), the Department of Health ( DOH), and the Department of Science and Technology-Philippine Council for Research and Development (DOST-PCHRD) in coordination with SmartDevNet, the developer community of Smart.
Wireless device to test water quality
Team members Norman Mascarinas, Kit Guial and Junel Bacong came up with an affordable and user-friendly wireless sensorbased water quality testing device and app called Shine Herald that can test the salinity and turbidity of water samples.
Health officials themselves using the device anywhere in the country can test water quality. The results can then be automatically transmitted by SMS to the DOH and the DOST in Metro Manila for analysis via a built-in Smart SIM card.
The group was inspired to make the Shine Herald device and app by Guial’s sister, a nurse, and his friend, a public health student at UP Manila.
“During medical missions to the provinces, they told me that before they could go there, they needed to assess first the water quality. It was a long and tedious process. Water had to be extracted from the locality and brought to Manila for analysis. Only then could the medical team go to the area,” says Guial.
“Our goal is to identify which areas are prone to water-borne diseases. We want to equip these barangays with affordable and easy-to-use tools to test and assess water quality. They just have to submerge the probe into the sample,” Mascarinas said.
“We can deploy these devices to rural areas with the help of the DOH. We want to automate the entire water testing and analysis process,” Bacong said.
The portable Shine Herald device, which costs around P4,000 to make, has a microcontroller that acts similar to a computer’s central processing unit ( CPU). The team then wrote a program that can generate a text message of up to 140 characters.
Helping solve public health problems
“This instrument is a step in solving public health problems in the country. If, for example, the water sample tested suggests the possibility of a dengue or diarrhea outbreak, barangay health officials can immediately ask for assistance. Lives can be saved if ample warning and countermeasures are set in place,” said Mascarinas.
The hackathon was designed for developers to create plug-ins for the SHINE OS+, an open-source electronic medical record system developed by the Ateneo Java Wireless Competency Center in partnership with Smart.
With SHINE OS+ app available for download for both Android and iOS devices, the goal of the hackathon is to connect and inter-operate different systems with SHINE, and create innovations that will assist government in improving healthcare services.
For bagging the grand prize, Team Quantum took home P100,000 in cash plus assorted gadgets from Smart.
They also have a chance to be incubated by the DOH, the DOSTPCHRD and IdeaSpace, the incubator arm of the First Pacific Group in the Philippines.