I’ve been reading a lot about Nicholas Negreponte’s One Laptop Per Child project. If you haven’t heard about it yet, the idea is to give away as many $100 laptops to children in the developing world as possible. The laptops have been designed to be linux based (apparantly running Red Hat) with a dual-mode display - a full-color, trasmissive DVD mode and a second display option that is black and white reflective and sunlight readable at 3x resolution. They will have a 500MHz processory and 128MB of DRAM and 500MB of flash memory. No hard disk but they will have 4 USB ports. The idea is for the laptops to connect to the internet via wireless broadband creating a mesh network with each laptop talking to other ones.

So, how will these devices improve health-care in developing countries? Indirectly, having access to a connected computer can increase skills and employability and therefore lift people out of poverty and away from the health problems associated with poverty. More directly though, this kind of project will allow communities to have better access to health professionals, via email, websites and VOIP communications. Patients isolated in remote communities will be able to keep in contact with health professionals in cities and have their condition monitored through the laptops. Health education campaigns could also be distributed via the laptops.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 2nd, 2006 at 1:19 am and is filed under eHealth. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.