WUNRN
Women's Feature Service
Women's e-News
System to Be Tested in Uganda to Save
Mothers
By Raymond
Baguma
Kampala (WeNews\WFS) - A low-cost maternal ultrasound system that began as a class project by a group of college students at the University of Washington in Seattle is to be tested by midwives in Uganda, a country with one of the world's highest maternal mortality rates.
The team of students from the University of Washington, who
have created the low-cost ultrasound machine.
(Courtesy: University of Washington)
Around 10 Ugandan
midwives will be selected to participate in the field test project. The
experiment will evaluate whether the device matches the midwives' needs and
skills.
The device is
designed to enable midwives to detect conditions that can complicate
pregnancies and birth, such as multiple births, breech births – when the
foetus' head is pointing upward - and blockage of the birth canal by the
placenta. Midwives spotting these high-risk conditions in time could refer
women to hospitals with facilities to handle them.
"We aim to make
an easy-to-learn and easy-to-use device, and the opinions of midwives are
crucial to our design process," said Alexis Hope, a graduate student in
the university's department of human centred design and engineering. "We
hope to use the results of the field test to improve on our design and then
return to
The student-designed
device connects an ultrasound probe to a laptop computer with a touch-sensitive
screen. Students have reduced the number of controls required to allow for
easier operation than the type of display set up found in doctors' offices and
hospitals.
The notebook has big,
touchable buttons, which make it easy to adjust the controls for a clearer
image. It also has a built-in system that provides assistance to the midwives
and suggests ways to make the scan image better.
To reduce the cost of
the device, the students wrote their own software. The device costs about
$3,500. Regular ultrasound machines usually cost anywhere between $15,000 and
$60,000, a prohibitive amount for many African health care providers. It could
also reduce the need for costly remote interpretation and diagnosis.
The pregnancy-related
death rates among Ugandan women stand at 430 per 100,000 live births, according
to the World Health Organization. In
The students' project
began in the summer of 2009, when Dr Rob Nathan, a
Nathan had a pilot
project in
Last winter, one of
Kolko's classes – Concepts in Human-Computer Interaction – teamed up with
computer science lecturer Ruth Anderson, teacher of a course called Designing
Technologies for Resource-Constrained Environments. That's how five students
set out to design a low-cost maternal ultrasound for use in the developing
world.
"We got thrown
into it after hearing a brief presentation by Dr Nathan about what he was
looking for," said Hope, one of the graduate students. "We sort of
jumped at the challenge."
The project evolved
into a senior-level research project in computer science and engineering. More
graduate students in the human centred design and engineering department joined
the group, many using the project to earn research credits.
The ultrasound unit
was tested in November last year by Seattle-area midwives, including ones with
little or no ultrasound experience. They were able to complete tasks similar to
the Ugandan midwives' expected tasks. In the same month, the students won a
$100,000 Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Grand Challenges Explorations grant,
which is designed to help scientists around the world explore ways to improve
health in developing countries. The grant will help the team research how to
make a cheaper, simpler ultrasound device.
"The Gates grant
came through after we had done some initial testing with Seattle-area midwives.
It is allowing us to take the critical next step of taking it to the
field," Hope said.
Receiving the Gates
Foundation grant "was very relieving," added Wayne Gerard, a team
member. "We were not sure where we were going to get funding to travel to
The ultrasound device
can't be expected to work miracles on
According to Janet
Obuni, chairperson of the
Given the relatively
sparse health facilities in
In the rural district of Kyenjojo,
midwife Rose Baguma says when high-risk pregnancies are detected by physical
examination, most mothers