Dear ODK team,
I am an Assistant Professor in Economics at UC Merced and have been working on a proposal to improve community health worker performance through improvements in technology. I am specifically partnering with the large non-profit organization BRAC, and we are interested in low-cost medical diagnostics that could be used through hand-held devices by community health workers. Specifically, BRAC and I are interested in developing (or incorporating) cost-effective and portable devices that would monitor parameters such as blood pressure and blood sugar, ideally with connectivity to a smart phone. We are interested in equipping their existing community health workers with these types of technologies to increase the identification of high-risk patients and improve diagnostic accuracy and timely referrals. Ideally, the technology would have improved censors for collecting data, digitize the data in real time, and provide a clinical decision support system.
Given your work in the field and expansion into biosensors, I was interested in learning more about ODK's work and whether the technology would be a good fit for this intervention. We are currently trying to find a partner to help us develop the technological component for this intervention and ODK's work seems very well aligned. I would greatly appreciate speaking with someone from the ODK team to learn more about existing and developing low-cost medical technologies and the potential to collaborate on this project. Would it be possible to schedule a call to discuss the BRAC proposal further? I hope this project sounds of interest and I look forward to hearing from you. Thank you for your consideration and time.
Best,
Ketki Sheth
Assistant Professor of Economics
UC Merced