Pesinet – Telediagnosis for children
Supported by the Orange Mali Foundation and Alcatel-Lucent, the Pesinet project (Pèse Infantile sur le Net or “Weighing children on the Net”) aims at deploying a medical prevention service amongst children, of 0 to 5 years old, who come from low-income families, using a “diagnosis at a distance” system based on monitoring and controlling children’s weight curves. The service consists of having children weighed in their homes once a week – twice a week for children under one year old – by trained persons living in the community concerned.
The method used for implementing the PESINET concept calls on three types of intervening party. They are the weighing personnel or “agents de pesée” commonly called the ADP, the paediatrician and the coordinator. The names of the families participating in the project are registered by the ADP during the first week of the month. Every evening, the names of the persons enrolled are transmitted to the coordinator. Every ADP is equipped with a mobile phone with a Java applications programme for different services. The ADPs note the weight of the child on their mobile phone and enter secondary data concerning the child’s health. This means knowing whether the child is suffering from vomiting or diarrhoea. This data is then sent once a day at the end of the ADP’s round to the doctor via the GPRS network, via a database installed in a computer-server in the premises of the Orange Mali Foundation. The programme doctor can then consult the children’s files by connecting to the Internet site dedicated to the PESINET service. He ticks the names of the children whom he wants to examine, on the Internet site.
A text message giving the names of the sick children is then sent to the weighing personnel concerned. They can then return to the families in question and distribute the consultation forms to the children who need them. The ADP are informed by SMS that a child has been chosen by the doctor for a consultation and they go to the families concerned to give them a consultation form. The children are then examined by the doctor.
