AppLab Tweets
Joyce Ndago and Maria Nuela, two of our MoTeCH field staff
In December we had our first workshop to introduce and test our mobile phone technology for MoTeCH to community health workers (CHWs) in the Upper East Region of Ghana. Prior to this workshop, much of our field research and testing has focused on building content for our “Pregnant Parents” application, but today we were focused on how MoTeCH can help practitioners deliver high quality antenatal and neonatal health care. (more…)
Health Clinic Registration Desk
How do AppLab programs get started? How do you really understand the best way to address the problems that people in poor rural communities face? The approach we have consistently taken for AppLab projects is to conduct a broad “needs assessment” survey at the very outset of the project. We work with experts in ethnographic research who spend hours and hours interviewing people in the field. The end result is qualitative data which helps to guide and inform our project work. (more…)
The "MoTeCH Song" being performed
As a part of our MoTeCH initiative, we are holding content workshops to learn more about what types of information local women want and need in relation to their health. In Accra, Ghana, Eve’s Pregnancy School has offered lessons about pregnancy and motherhood to women for over 10 years, and has seen over 2,000 mothers through safe pregnancy and delivery. The founder, Florence, gives bi-monthly classes to pregnant women and mothers; she attended our first content workshop recently and had lots of fantastic input for our program. One of the key takeaways from the workshop was that singing and music is an important part of Ghanaian culture and this class opened with the women singing a local song about womanhood, empowerment, and feminine beauty. It definitely got people excited! Part of the class was then given over to the group chanting “positive utterances” such as “my body is strong”, “i will have a safe delivery”, “my family loves me”, and “my husband loves me”. Teaching was interspersed between these more fun and participatory sessions. (more…)
Woman on phone - UER
Since the beginning, the Mobile Technology for Community Health (MoTech) team has been focusing on using rapid prototyping for figuring out what will – and won’t – work in the rural environment. A week ago, the team headed to the poorest region in Ghana – the Upper East (UER) – to set up a series of exercises to determine whether pregnant mothers would be interested in asking questions about their pregnancy and newborn care via mobile phones. We were wanted to understand what types of questions they were interested in having answered, and what the technical (mobile phone usage, SMS vs. voice, network issues) aspects of providing this service to parents in rural areas would be. (more…)
