Baby’s Necklace Could End Up Being a Life Saver

Friday, December 12, 2014

It’s traditional for newborns in northern India to wear a black thread necklace as a symbol of good health and good fortune, but Vikram’s got a high-tech version. The round pendant on the string is a wearable device called Khushi Baby that carries his vaccination history inside a computerized chip about the size of a dime.

Khushi Baby was created by undergrads at Yale University in spring 2013. The students were taking a class called “Appropriate Technologies for the Developing World.” The assignment: create a gadget for tracking health data in remote environments.

That’s not just a classroom exercise. Parents in India (and many other countries) receive paper health cards to keep track of a child’s vaccine doses, but paper is easily misplaced, says Leen van Besien, who co-developed the idea for Khushi Baby. And there aren’t digital health records to consult. In Rajasthan, where Vikram lives, clinicians write vaccination information by hand in in large paper logbooks as they travel from village to village. Thousands of names are kept in the books, making it hard to search through when a vaccine card is misplaced.

Source: NPR (link opens in a new window)

Categories
Health Care
Tags
healthcare technology