#tech4dev

The Impact of Bridging the Digital Divide in Rural Madagascar

We are thrilled to announce that we will host a panel: Bright Spots: Innovations for Quality, Reliability or Safety of Medical Technologies at the 2016 International UNESCO Conference in Technologies for Development: From Innovation to Social Impact. Core thematic areas include:

Technologies for Humanitarian Action

Medical Technologies

Science and Technology for Disaster Risk Reduction

Technologies for Sustainable Access to Energy

ICT for Development

Technologies for Sustainable Habitat and Cities

Our panel focuses on medical technologies deployed in low and middle-income countries (LMIC) that often encounter a lack of clear guidelines for how to address quality, reliability, and/or safety (QRS). In this regulatory absence, innovators have stepped up to develop creative QRS solutions.

We will examine "bright spots" – promising examples of systems level innovations that address the QRS of medical technology. Our session features four systems level initiatives. We are pleased to introduce our panelists:

Emmanuel Kouemo Tchokodjeu, Cardiac Centre Shisong, Cameroon, Advanced Medical Technologies Management in Limited Resources Settings Context: Five Years’ Experience from the Cardiac Centre of Shisong in Cameroon

Roberto Musi, United Nations Office for Project Services, Haiti Office, Setup of Health Technologies Maintenance Units in Complex Settings: An Experience from Three Community Reference Hospitals in Haiti

Andrei Dizon Coronel, Ateneo de Manila University, Philippines, The eHATID LGU Program: A Continuing Effort in the Collaborative Challenge of Nationwide Health Informatics

David Matthew Garrity, GVA Research LLC, United States of America, Additionality vs. Systems Approach: ICT and Tuberculosis Epidemic in Southern Africa

Speaker abstracts: http://cooperation.epfl.ch/2016Tech4Dev/Program/Sessions/DAY1/SE05-MED

Our panel will explore questions including:

what QRS issue did the initiative aim to address?

how did they solve it?

what outcomes/impact have they had?

To enhance the learning and translation of these programs to other settings, we will focus our discussion on:

what unexpected outcomes were encountered?

what/who were facilitators of success?

what failures did they experience and how did they recover?

what were/are the biggest challenges going forward?

Our discussion will be practical as it will center on lessons learned from implemented solutions. We will surface facilitators of success and key stakeholders engaged in order to enable successful replication of these promising models.

To review the full preliminary program: http://cooperation.epfl.ch/2016Tech4Dev/Program

Early Bird Registration ends March 31: Please Register: http://cooperation.epfl.ch/2016Tech4Dev/Registration

We wanted to share these two calls for upcoming Tech4Dev conferences:

1) UNESCO Chair in Technologies for Development: From Innovation to Social Impact, 2-4 May 2016, EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland

Call for breakout session & event proposals due 11 Sept http://cooperation.epfl.ch/2016Tech4Dev/Call1

Core Themes: Humanitarian Action, Medical Technologies, Disaster Risk Reduction, Energy, ICT4D, Habitat

Cross cutting issues: Gender, Open Innovation, Living Labs/Hackathons, IoT, Scaling Businesses, Public-Private Partnerships http://cooperation.epfl.ch/2016Tech4Dev/ThematicAreas

** If you want to propose an event or breakout session/panel on Open Source, IoT, MedTech and/or ICT4D- let's talk! **

Stay tuned: Call for abstracts begins Oct 5 ... Follow: @codevEPFL 2) ISTAS IEEE, International Symposium on Technology & Society, Dublin, Ireland 11-12 Nov 2015 "Culture, Ethics & Knowledge Society"

Call for practitioner and oral presentations due 14 Sept http://www.istas2015.org/home/default.asp?page=c4p Thematic priorities: Technology and Development: Humanitarian Engineering and ICT4D; Impact of Collaborative Open Innovation, Alignment with Public Policy Professional and Research Ethics in STEM  (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Maths) Future Internet: Balancing Personal Privacy, Public Security and Surveillance; Connected Enterprise; Impact of Consumer Electronics

Next Generation Computing: Big Data; Embedded & Wearable Technology; Cloud Computing; Internet of Things; Sensor Networks; Smart Cities

Technological Forecasting

We are thrilled to share our chapter:

Open Issues and a Proposal for Open-source Technologies to Assure Quality, Reliability, and Safety in Health Care Devices Targeting Low- and Middle-income Countries

that appears in the book: Technologies for Development, edited by Sylvia Hostettler. 

S. Hostettler et al. (eds.), Technologies for Development, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-16247-8_8 © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015

Last June, we presented our research in two papers at UNESCO’s Technology for Development conference, hosted at EPFL in Lausanne and organized by Sylvia Hostettler.  Our paper that presented the background research and proposal for OpenQRS was presented in the Openness Paradigm Panel and was invited for publication in the conference book.

We are Chapter 8 in the book.  Here are the table of contents for the chapter:

8. Open Issues and a Proposal for Open-source Technologies to Assure Quality, Reliability, and Safety in Health Care Devices Targeting Low- and Middle-income Countries

8.1 Introduction

8.2 Methods

8.3 Results

   8.3.1 Health Care Product Development

   8.3.2 A Changing Landscape

   8.3.3 Stakeholder Perspectives on the Current State of Affairs

   8.3.4 Synthesis: Stakeholders in Emerging Markets

8.4 Key Issues to Address in the Current Context

8.5 Timing for a New, Open Approach to QRS

8.6 Conclusion

References