Khushi Baby

This information and communication technology (ICT) project is premised on the fact that parents in India (and many other countries) receive paper health cards to keep track of a child's vaccine doses, but paper is easily misplaced. In Rajasthan, for instance, clinicians write vaccination information by hand in large paper logbooks as they travel from village to village. Thousands of names are kept in the books, making it hard to search the records when a vaccine card is misplaced.

Due to the fact that there are often no digital health records to consult, Khushi Baby's technology ensures that, when vaccinations are administered, the healthcare worker can scan the necklace with their Khushi Baby app on their smartphone to transfer vaccination data to the necklace. (Mobile phone settings can be changed to display all text in the app in Hindi or in English.) The data is also automatically uploaded to "the cloud" once the healthcare worker returns to the clinic. The cloud is a general term for anything that involves delivering hosted services over the internet. These services are broadly divided into three categories: Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Parents then receive automatic voice calls reminding them about vaccination clinics and, during their next visit, the healthcare worker can scan the necklace of the baby to see which vaccines are due.

During a trip to villages in Rajasthan in the summer of 2014, the team partnered with Seva Mandir, a grassroots non-governmental organisation (NGO) that helps distribute government-provided vaccines in remote regions. Khushi Baby will roll out a pilot project in 2015, providing necklaces to the 4,000 children vaccinated by Seva Mandir health workers each year. The clinicians will have the smartphone app, so they can record the inoculations and upload the info to Seva Mandir computers. The idea is to make it easier to track children who missed a dose - and to know how many vaccines are needed for the next trip. Together, these organisations are conducting a randomised control trial and hope to expand the effort to apply to other uses in various regions in the future.

Immunisation and Vaccines.

India boasts one of lowest vaccine coverage rates in the world, in part because children do not complete their vaccine schedules. For example, in 2013, 7 million children did not receive all three doses for pertussis, also known as whooping cough. As a result, India recorded more cases of this life-threatening disease - 31,000 - than any other nation.

Khushi Baby was created by undergraduate students at Yale University in the United States in Spring 2013. The students were taking a class called "Appropriate Technologies for the Developing World." The assignment: create a gadget for tracking health data in remote environments. After winning the Thorne Prize for Social Innovation in Health in 2014, this classroom project became an organisation: Khushi Baby. For a window into the process, including how polio immunisation came into play, see this blog entry, "Field Visit to Nalcawaz and Chaali" by Ruchit Nagar, July 23 2014.

To keep costs low, the team used inexpensive computer chips that can communicate with smartphones. (Each necklace costs US$1). The team avoided using metal clasps on the necklace, which can fall off and be a choking hazard. So the necklace just slips over the head. The plastic pendant, which encases the computer chip, is waterproof.