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 Toby Norman, Daniel Storisteanu, and Alexandra Grigore hooked up
with Toby's brother Tristram to create Simprints, a scanner that
gives health workers easy access to the medical records of patients
in the developing world.
According to Toby Norman, the quartet originally wanted to devise
software using existing fingerprint scanners, but realized that none
on the market fitted the bill.
He said: "When we first started we thought this would simply be a
software problem - we'd buy an off-the-shelf fingerprint scanner,
write a bit of software, connect it to a mobile phone, and that
would solve the problem. However, when we looked at the applications
out there we found that most scanners out there were designed for
westernized applications, designed for office use, commercial use,
criminal justice, to applications like that. What we actually needed
was a scanner that is low cost, ruggedised, wireless, low energy,
and could work well in difficult field conditions."
The scanner wirelessly syncs with a health worker's smartphone via
an app to check patient records. The SimPrints system can access and
modify offline health records that have already been downloaded and
stored in a local database on the phone. This means that in areas
with limited mobile connectivity, updates to the records will
subsequently be synced with the central database once Internet
connectivity returns.
 Tristram Norman, from the Royal Holloway, University of London, said
the device involved two steps that make it easy for an outreach
community health worker to access patient healthcare records.
He said: "The two steps we do here are we capture the image and
break this image down into a key and this key can then be
transferred to an existing m-health application, so a community
health worker out there will have a phone with an m-health app on
it, such as ODK (open data kit), and that phone will have a database
of existing records or records that they're trying to capture and
will be able to use the key that we capture from their fingerprint
to unlock those records, to bring those records to the foreground so
they can see 'has his person been seen before? Have they been
treated before? What round of medications they're currently on?'
These kinds of things."
Tristram Norman says the device is easy to use. He said: "A health
worker will come to the field and they'll have a phone or tablet
like this and they'll say 'we're seeing these patients, we're here
to provide medication, food drive,' and they'll say 'Great, swipe
your fingerprint' and then they'll use this fingerprint to search
the record database and say 'do you have existing medical records
and can we access those?'"
He added: "The Simprints technology can integrate with any phone
that currently has Bluetooth and we're focusing on the Android
platform because the Android platform is the largest growing mobile
platform currently in the developing world."
Currently health workers in remote areas find it hard to identify
clients, who may have no birth certificate or passport, and whose
records have previously been held on paper. The Simprints team
believes their device will also allow health workers to better
monitor vaccination levels and help civil registration records by
enabling tracking of births and deaths.
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The Simprints team designed five separate scanner models and have
been road-testing them with NGOs (non-governmental organizations). A
final choice will be made before a large-scale trial is carried out
in Bangladesh next January. The pilot study will take part in
partnership with BRAC and the Johns Hopkins Global m-Health
Initiative in Gaibandha, district.
According to head of field testing, Storisteanu, "the next step
we're going to be doing is to take five of our shortlisted sensors
and test them and look at what's the best performance for global
health applications."
Some challenges haven't yet been overcome, such as fingerprint
identification of infants, who have fewer unique identifiers on
their fingerprints, and manual laborers whose rough hands make
getting a print difficult. But the team hopes their next prototype
might solve this problem. In the meantime, strategies include
connecting an infant's record to the fingerprints of their parents
and enrolling multiple fingerprints for manual laborers - and the
elderly - to increase matching accuracy.
Toby Norman insists the process is entirely secure. "Getting patient
application right is absolutely essential," he said. "At Simprints
we do three things to get that right. First we don't work with
patient medical records, so we never store or hold access to patient
data. That's all held by the organizations we work with. Second we
never transmit raw fingerprint images, so we actually do the
extraction process where we take a fingerprint image and turn it
into a template. We do that on the scanner itself, meaning that the
fingerprint image never leaves the scanner. Third we use the same
level of encryptions that we use in online banking or financial
transactions that secure any data that passes between the phone and
the server."
The trio from Cambridge are all Gates Scholars, receiving funding
from the Gates foundation set up by Microsoft guru Bill Gates and
his wife Melinda to improve global healthcare. Toby Norman says that
by the time of mass production - which could be within a one year -
the cost of each scanner will be under 50 USD, which is the price
that NGOS informed Simprints would be a game-changer.
According to Simprints, every year 1.5 million children from
vaccine-preventable diseases, and the company hopes their scanner
will help reduce that figure significantly.
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