While EKGs are present in most major healthcare facilities, they are often extremely large, bulky and complicated machines that are difficult and prohibitively expensive to repair. During our time in the field, we came across an EKG machine in the Ocotal hospital that was no longer functioning and was simply waiting for the appropriate repairs.
During our visit to a rural health center outside of Ocotal, we spoke with a physician who articulated the desire for an EKG and other tools to allow him to diagnose heart problems. This opened our eyes to the fact that smaller, more remote facilities are also interested in this technology but lack the appropriate resources to obtain and use them.
Through our project, we intend to address a need for cardiac diagnostic tools. Our goal is to allow health practitioners at all levels (from doctors to rural community health workers) to be able to record diagnostically useful information about the state of patients’ cardiac health and to transmit that information to specialists. The foundation of the device will be an EKG machine with a user-friendly display and a power source that is adaptable to a variety of settings.
In addition to the EKG itself, we plan to explore the idea of integrating other diagnostic abilities, such as recording of heart sounds into a sound file that can be shared electronically with other specialists.
Finally, in an effort to encourage diagnostic collaboration while acknowledging the minimal presence of email in many of the communities, we plan to design a platform for sharing both the results of the EKG printout and the heart sounds with others. Our device will provide guidance on when results should be shared, although users will be encouraged to use their own discretion depending on their level of expertise. We hope that by providing this service we can provide tools for practitioners to at every step of the process-from the moment the patient enters the clinic until an accurate diagnosis is made.
We anticipate that the electric portion of our project will be quite straightforward given the immense number of resources available for guidance in that direction. Because of this, a very large aspect of our project will be creating an innovative presentation that is understandable to anybody, regardless of their medical expertise, and that is integrated with the communication system that we will design. We plan to make use of a very clear and user-friendly language of design, and we hope that presenting the device in a modular fashion will eliminate many potential problems in the case that something goes wrong during operation of the system.
