Part II: Remote Medical Diagnostics in PyS60

MUK - Faculty of technology

Mobile Engineering Focus Group (Research & Development)
Research:Mobile Health Applications
Victor Miclovich
Appfrica Labs
victor.miclovich@appfrica.org
vicmiclovich@ugandasoft.com

November 13, 2009

Contents cialize open source products3 . It is during the

lectures that we shall look at snippets of code.
1 Remote Medical Diagnosis 1 An account on GitHub will be set up for this
project. For versioning of content we shall use
2 Anatomy of our RMD tool 2 Git4

3 Costs, Costs, Costs 2

4 Backend and Interoperability
5 Assignments of tasks to the team 4 identification of the illnesses of a person
Abstract
This paper described the research that is un-
derway in the field of remote medical diag-
nostics. I have chosen to use PyS601 because
of Python’s agility and ease of use as a pro-
gramming language. Over these series of pa-
pers I shall be going through the developmen-
tal overview of the RMD2 under Python; they
shall describe the technologies we shall use
as a team. And probably this shall be open
sourced. There’re still good ways to commer-
1
Python for S60
2 5
Remote Medical Diagnostics
1 Remote Medical Diagnosis
3
Remote medical diagnosis is defined as the
without the benefit of a formal medical
examination. But it is better to put it as
”an identification by a physician who has not
himself fully examined the patient”.
RMD is an area with a lot of promise and has
been called many names from ”telemedicine”
to ”mobile health”.
This small article is to open up the minds
of this group. I hope you guys get more ideas
and encouragement5 .
3
like servicing and provision of deployment
4
Those that know SVN can still use it; there’s a
great plugin called svn-git that allows you to migrate
SVN repositories to git.
try to get as many S60 phones... not just Nokia,

1
2 Anatomy of our RMD tool Alice may want to take a sound recording
of the patient’s cough... chest murmurs can
This is an overview of how a person in the signify heart disease and many other human
”field” can use this tool. Some MIT6 students ”bugs”.
designed Moca which is a platform that does She may also prefer to take a video recording
a similar thing but on the Android platform. while documenting her fears and suggestions
We are doing one that is based on the Symbian to a distant physician.
OS but using Python. We shall add more
features as the development continues. The TechnoRMD8 should have a sense of
location... this is to save Alice time, she
This is a tool with great promise to Devel- should focus on just taking the necessary
oping nations and Developed ones too. details. The application (TechnoRMD) should
All a person in a really remote area has to do is do the rest. In essence, TechnoRMD will have
have a phone with him; a smart phone is pre- an LBS9 feature..
ferred to just the SMS-Voice-only-type phones.
With this phone, the user can type out a prob-
lem or issues of concern such as:
• Name of person 3 Costs, Costs, Costs
• Age Costs are one of the most important issues in
the build of this application. But I am not
• weight referring to financial costs. Well, maybe just
• sex a bit. But according to certain laws10 , I am
sure this venture is viable.
• temperature readings
Back to the important concepts here. The
• etc.
cost that I refer to here are technological costs:
In addition to that list, the user (in many such as the cost of bandwidth in terms of relia-
cases, this could be a nurse), may have to take bility. We are seeing and being witnesses to the
pictures of affected areas or the diseased body rates of data transfer almost doubling or trip-
part7 . Palpations and colorings say a lot in pling... the monetary costs are almost down11 .
the medical world. The pictures could be of Low Internet costs rules out the weight that
eyes... the color of the pupils, the constrictions ”Costs” has here.
of the iris. Medical data is immensely rich So that leaves me with only addressing the
and inaccuracy can cause many problems or
8
worsen the existing ones. For want of a better name, I think we should call
this venture/tool something like TechnoRMD
9
Location Based Service
Let us call this user or nurse Alice; this is 10
Moore’s law:The processing power of a microchip
for reasons that may help simplify ambiguity doubles every 18 months. Corollary:compters become
and the gravity of the problems this can solve. faster - and the price of a given level of computing
power halves - every 18 months. This just means that
Samsung has got some, just do some investigation the costs are going to go down significantly.
6 11
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Orange Telecom, for example lets a customer with
7
this could be the skin around a malignant patch on an Internet enabled phone, surf the Internet at the cost
a breast of less than a soda which is less than $0.5

2
reliability of the connections to all forms of 3. Multi-modal transfers: this application
”Internet-Data connectivity” such as: should allow the Symbian phone access
to all possible Internet ”access”... Multi-
• GPRS modal just means many modes and that
• USB tether means we can use all options that the de-
vice supports:
• Broad band Wimax12
• GPRS
• Wi-fi over BroadBand
• Wi-fi (when close to a free-public
• etc. wifi )
• SMS and MMS (the textual data can
In many remote places in Africa, connectivity
be sent using SMS )
is still not that good. So this leaves us to use
interesting techniques. Some of which I got • USB tether (this just means, you can
from Moca app’s design. connect to a PC or laptop with Inter-
So what do we do to ensure a reliable data net access, and just have your cached
connection and data transfers: data sent)

1. Synchronization: this refers to the use of

existing storage of the Phone. That’s just 4 Backend and Interoperabil-
a database, right? So, we shall now start ity
thinking of solutions that give us cheap
and reliable storage. Also, we have to em- For this app to work well enough. We shall
bed a background listening service that use a three-tier type design. A three tier is
should check cellular coverage and as soon a client-server architecture in which the user
as the it is available, data is uploaded. interface14 , functional process logic, computer
2. Packetization: the medical data I de- data storage and data access are developed
scribed earlier is pretty heavy and so this and maintained as independent 15 .
modules, most
cause the data transfer or upload to a often on separate platforms.
server to take some time... and think of
the number of individuals that might be in This is the design pattern that we shall use.
line waiting their turn for ”inspection” by The client side is the interface on your phone;
Alice... Yeah, I know that look, they are this is can include stuff like a couple of forms
so frustrated if Alice’s phone has got is- (single text dialogs), popup-menus and lots of
sues. So we can design several algorithms other stuff. But, by now you should know that
that will locally queue all this data of dif- the mobile device is really ”LIMITED”... I
ferent individuals before sending it off. So should be shouting this loud.
Alice can go on with her even if there’s no But being limited does not mean that the de-
cellular coverage13 . sign should be fake! or so uncool! The client
will never communicate directly to the data
12
WIMAX: Wireless Inter-operable Microwave access
13 14
This will take some more ”tech” stuff to put down; what we see)
15
this involves IP programming, SSH programming for This definition is got from Wikipedia; there are
security, playing with data protocols in order to boost some cool drawings, check them out. Just search for
efficiency and reliability. n-tier or three tier

3
Figure 1: This is an image of a 3 tier system

tier or database. It will use a server that will

be running OpenMRS16 .

5 Assignments of tasks to the

team
We shall have this task of setting this app up
compartmentalized. In the following ways:

1. Team lead

2. User Experience Designer

3. UI designers... about two of them can do.

4. And other coders!

16
OpenMedical Record System is a well development
system that supports stuff that deals with medical data