Product is being tested in India with the help of Rajasthani NGO Seva Mandir.
By Raif Karerat
WASHINGTON, DC: An Indian American student at Yale, along with a graduate of the university, have developed an NFC-powered necklace that can digitally store immunization records.
While “Khushi Baby” began as a class project, Ruchit Nagar and Leen van Besien, a Yale student and graduate, respectively, raised more than $30,000 on Kickstarter to do a pilot run with their technology and it has since snowballed into a practical experiment with real-world applications.
The Khushi Baby product is a necklace that contains an infant’s complete medical history and vaccination records, according to YaleNews. Using the necklace and a smartphone, medical personnel can view the digitized information via existing, near-field communication technology and a mobile app created by the Yale students.
“Clinicians can simply scan the chip with a mobile phone to see which vaccinations the baby needs,” according to the Khushi Baby website. “As soon as the phone enters an area with cellular service, it uploads all vaccine data to the cloud. Back at the office, health workers can monitor it in real time. With highly specific and accurate data at their fingertips, they have a better sense of the needs of the surrounding communities.”
Many non-governmental agencies in the developing world keep children’s immunization records in paper books, which are fragile, difficult to transport, hard to search through, and easily lost. Nagar hopes his product can alleviate those issues.
Earlier this year, Khushi Baby won Yale’s 2014 Thorne Prize for Social Innovation in Health, and the students used the $25,000 prize money to meet with families and clinicians in India to gather more information.
“We didn’t know we were going to be making a necklace,” Nagar told YaleNews.
The initial plan was to make the device a bracelet, but the field interviews indicated that many infants in Northern India already wear necklaces that are symbolic of good health, and thus, the Khushi Baby’s current form factor was decided upon.
The necklace’s primary drawback is that it requires a smartphone to glean relevant data from the necklace and many health workers aren’t equipped with one. However, India is one of the fastest growing smartphone markets in the world, which bodes well for the proliferation of mobile health technology such as Khushi Baby’s.
Nagar and his team are currently testing their product with Rajasthani NGO Seva Mandir, which administers vaccines in Northern India. According to Forbes, the organization intends to start providing smartphones for their health workers in order to bolster its operations; eight smartphones can reportedly reach about 4,000 children in a year.