Software to Make Highways Safe

 Suppose that a Jumbo jet crashed every day in India, killing all passengers in it. A similar number of deaths occur due to road accidents every day (377 deaths/day, or approximately 137,605 deaths/year). The country is not able to do much to reduce the number of these accidents.  I believe that our engineering colleges should do R & D to reduce the number of road fatalities. I will offer suggestions in this article. I hope they will trigger thinking and discussions. 

Reduce Speeding on Highways

India has made FASTags mandatory for highway users https://www.npci.org.in/what-we-do/netc-fastag/product-overview  This automates the recording of vehicle’s license-plate numbers and the time at which they cross any toll gate. In each case, the distance to the next toll road is known. Therefore, any vehicle exceeding the speed limit between two toll gates can be detected easily. All we need is Internet connectivity to each toll gate. This could be through a landline connection or through a cellular connection. Procedure-wise, rules can authorize the police to seize any over-speeding vehicle unless the driver pays a specified fine on the spot. 

An app running on a PC or even on a cell phone can alert the staff at a toll gate. How many lives would this project save?

Highlight Fatality Sites  

A high fraction of vehicles have someone carrying a smartphone equipped with a map application. We can work with the app service provider to maintain and utilize a nationwide database of road fatalities: locations in which one or more lives were lost within the previous 30 days. As any app user approaches a fatality site the app can indicate this in a suitable manner and give details. The text should be written for the purpose of making users aware of the risks in that segment of the road.

Enabling every road user to be a safety warden  

We see dangerous behavior on highways. These include trucks standing on a highway blocking a lane, vehicles doing illegal turns and road crossings, and vehicles not having the required lights on. Vehicles, usually two-wheelers, running against the traffic. Rarely do we report such problems and provide location information. An app can be developed to work with a map app. The map app could display a red disc or some such prominent icon all the time it is being used. The user should be able to use the icon and activate a reporting mechanism. This should automatically report the location. It should also enable the user to take a photograph optionally and add a short written text. The reporting user’s identity should be protected by encryption but should be available to a court if it is considered essential. The app should not require the user to stop at the place where the risk is present. That location should be identified as one where the user activated the reporting mechanism. The app should allow the user to complete the report within a specified time from the moment the reporting mechanism is activated. 

In conclusion, reduction of risks and fatalities is an essential objective in engineering. Technology can reduce road deaths by at least 25% within the next two years. That is, technology can save over 30,000 lives per year.

Srinivasan Ramani 

This article was originally published in Volume 4 Issue 4 of
Advanced Computing and Communications

 

 

 

Personal Health Records on cell phones

I bought a new cell phone recently and was happy to find a facility it provided for creating a simple Electronic Health Record (EHR) for myself. EHRs can be quite complex as you can find by looking through the document http://www.nhp.gov.in/NHPfiles/Comments_invited_on_the_draft_of_Revised_EHR_Standards_for_India.pdf

What will work in the near future are simple forms of records that can be created on one’s cell phone by oneself or by a hospital. Typically, the EHR should provide for capturing information such as:

•      Name, date of birth, blood type, and emergency contacts
•      Name and phone number of doctor
•      Major illnesses and surgeries (giving dates)
•      A list of medicines being taken with dosages
•      Any allergies
•      Any diseases one has had over many years
•      Major illnesses suffered by one's parents, brothers or sisters
•      Habits such as smoking and alcohol consumption 

I urge students to experiment with simple apps to enable the creation and use of EHRs. Why an app? Why not a simple file created with a text editor?

I think an app can provide many advantages such as the following:

• The app will enable content to be created with prompting, and to be displayed when necessary. Users with sufficient knowledge may handle the app themselves. In other cases, someone else could handle the app on the user’s behalf. The app may protect the contents by going through a dialog that prevents careless handling by users who cannot cope with the complexity of handling medical information using a text editor.
• The app may allow a hospital staff member to access the data using Bluetooth connection and update it. Design issues that arise include safeguards to protect privacy.
• A well-designed app may allow the storage of doctor-generated information on the cell phone, replacing handwritten notes. This may include a section on medicines to be issued by a pharmacy giving dosages and directions for use.
• The app may allow a display of directions for taking the medicines and may also provide an alarm at the right time, once a day or more often as required.
• The app may give information in the patient’s own language whenever this is possible.

Different apps may provide different levels of capabilities, but should ideally be able to handle migration of essential information between apps at different levels as the user changes his cell phone or app. An interesting question that arises is that of securely storing doctor-generated information. Perhaps this can be digitally signed in apps running on smart phones with adequate resources.

The important point to note is that projects like this work best in environments in which the developer works closely with a doctor or hospital. Pure technology is not enough.  

end

Apps that make low-end cell phones valuable

There was a time when young people excited about electronics would build themselves a radio! Now young people excited about computing and the Internet create an app! I will talk about apps that make low-end cellphones valuable. I hope to trigger many student projects with this posting.

As far as I know, it is impossible to get apps to run on most low-end cell-phones. These devices are nevertheless very important in countries like India, where they constitute a large fraction of cell phones in use. They serve millions of users who do not have access to the Internet for various reasons. My focus is on school students in small towns and in rural areas. What I say in this blog does not apply to sophisticated smart phone users. Since 2/3rds of cell phones are in the hands of rural users, my focus is socially very relevant.

An accompanying post on my other blog at http://obvioustruths.blogspot.in/2012/09/the-reality-of-mobile-value-added.html provides relevant statistics on the way cell-phones are used in India for non-voice services. The key points arising out of the discussion in that post are the following: The average cell phone user in India uses less than Rs 90 of services per month. About 70% of this is for voice calls, leaving only Rs 24 for other services. Mobile apps and games take hardly Rs 5 per month. A major factor that inhibits use of Internet applications on the cell phone is the complexity of the human interface. Most users do not know how to download and install apps and how to use a browser effectively. They do not know how to get information on these topics and learn these skills.

My thesis is that the SMS (or texting) interface is easy to use for a large fraction of the population. I also believe that a whole lot can be achieved using a servlet on the web somewhere. It can serve a large population that is comfortable with the SMS interface. Of course, in parallel it can also serve smart phone users with access to a 2G or 3G service.

http://www.txtweb.com

I was thrilled to discover a few months ago that the site txtweb.com (created and being maintained by Intuit Inc.) offers a painless SMS interface for servlets to deliver services. This site transforms SMS messages into http queries to send to your servlet and maps the servlet’s responses into SMS messages that are sent back to the users. There is no charge for this service. There is a healthy developer community and a forum.

Txtweb.com offers a challenge to every student who can create a servlet. It is not mere programming. The opportunity challenges you to think like an entrepreneur and identify a service that meets the needs of a large number of cell phone users. Creating a service like that is a good project for a team, as it requires talents of different kinds: to visualize a good application, to find necessary resources on the Web, to design and implement the software and to publicize the service.

For an example of a service of the type I have discussed, try the one I have implemented. It supports school students, typically those in the 9^th and 10^th standards in their efforts to learn the English language. It helps any interested user to test his or her own ability to guess a word that fills a blank in a given sentence meaningfully. It is well-known that this a good test of English comprehension.

The site focuses on common English words found in every science textbook. These are not “scientific” words, but words that every English-medium student of science has to know. The idea is that students can take a new test every month and know where they stand. Testing is an important part of teaching, but only a small part. Ideally the student should take the help of a relative or friend to discuss questions. The student should read English language books outside the syllabus – ideally story books that are very interesting. They should learn to use a dictionary well and frequently. 

The following web pages describe how this service can be accessed over SMS from within India 
http://www.hydrusworld.org/Tests over SMS.html

and over Instant Messaging from anywhere on the Web
http://www.hydrusworld.org/Tests over IM.html

I should mention that my Java Servlet is hosted on the Google App Engine cloud for free (visit https://developers.google.com/) for information on this facility.

I hope that readers of this post would go on and create many other services to serve a needy population.

Srinivasan Ramani