Archives
Contribute
| Prajnopaya Foundation Cooperation With MIT Teams Pays Off |
Umang Kumar
05/10/2007
Cambridge, Mass. -- Three teams froam the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) that took part in the 2006/2007 Mohammad Yunus IDEAS competition and had Prajnopaya Foundation as their community partner were awarded the top three spots for their breakthrough ideas.
The Prajnopaya Foundation is an internationally active humanitarian organization that aims to increase the standard of living of the world’s poor via educational, health and social welfare projects.
"IDEAS" is an acronym for Innovation Development Enterprise Action Service and is a competition held at MIT. The Yunus Challenge IDEAS Award for 2006/2007 was intended for the team that created a system that solved as many of the problems as possible that cause non-adherence to Tuberculosis (TB) drugs in rural, developing country contexts, for the smallest cost possible.
In June 2005, the Prajnopaya Foundation launched the Tuberculosis Treatment and Prevention project (TBTP) in the state of Bihar, India to provide diagnosis and treatment for poor communities not covered by national TB campaigns.
The Foundation realizes that the current treatment of TB is often an arduous, error-prone process with inefficient methods to ensure adherence and monitoring. To that end the Foundation decided to work with the teams from MIT, providing them with vital information regarding ground realities and the nature of the problem.
The teams and the Foundation had wide-ranging discussions and worked in close co-operation to come up with solutions that the Foundation believes will be practical and efficacious. This is in line with the Foundation’s belief in the collaboration between practical research in healthcare and its implementation to alleviate suffering and make healthcare accessible to all.
Of the winning teams, one designed a cell-phone based incentive solution called CellCentives; the other a pill-dispensation device called uBox; and the third team, Team Treatment Buddy, proposed creating peer groups of patients under treatment.
The TBTP project has established a network of doctors and local volunteers who help run temporary clinics for diagnosis and continue to perform follow-up treatment. In March 2006, Prajnopaya organized TBTP screening camps with assistance from the Bihar Tuberculosis Association, in three villages over three days. Of the 1137 patients screened during the 3-day camps, greater than 50% were found to have active TB and were prescribed treatment.
The Foundation intends to run its next TBTP camps in at least 3 sites covering about 15 villages in Bihar and the Himalayan region of Ladakh from Oct 2007 to April 2008. It will assist the winning teams in running pilot programs of their proposed solutions.
For more information on Foundation’s work on TB, visit tb.prajnopaya.org.
|
You may also access this article through our web-site http://www.lokvani.com/
