Intel : World Ahead Community Implementation

Tuesday, June 03, 2008

World Ahead program is a global initiative from Intel, to improve lives of people living in developing communities by providing them easy access to technology. This is the first implementation in India under this project which is done at Baramati, a tier 4 town in Pune. World Ahead is a community where ICT enabled solutions in the areas of Education, Healthcare, shared access etc are implemented with the objective of providing easy access to its citizens. This is done by the industry along with local partners and govt. facilitation. In Baramati five usage Models have been Implemented. Lets take a look at them one by one.

Remote Diagnostics at Rui Hospital
A tele-diagnostic facility has been implemented at Rui Hospital in Baramati. This hospital has been connected to Narayan Hridayalaya in Bangalore and Aravind Eye Hospital. Being collaborated with Narayan Hridayalaya, Rui hospital is able to provide cardiac care to citizens of Baramati. ECGs are taken and sent for diagnosis to Narayan Hridayalaya and diagnosis results are returned by Narayan Hirdayala within 10 minutes. Collaboration with Aravind eye hospital is to provide Ophthalmic diagnosis services where images of eyes is examined by ophthalmic surgeons at Aravind eye hospital and results are sent back with an hour. Now almost 150 -200 out patients being registered every day. On an average, 5 patients on every working day are diagnosed by Narayan Hridayalaya for Cardiac care, and almost 10 – 15 patients are diagnosed by Aravind Eye hospital for eye care.

Mobile PC Labs
With the aim to provide computer education to children living in Baramati and its nearby rural areas, Mobile PC Van initiative was taken up. These vans are basically buses equipped with PCs along with 2 trainers for each bus. A total of 5 Vans were deployed which cover 49 rural schools in and around Baramati. So far 7936 students have been reached under this project. With this project students have become more aware of IT opportunities and schools are experiencing reduction in school drop out rates. Moreover students are doing projects using computers and educating their parents (largely farmers) on using technology to improve their knowledge on farm productivity.

Ravi is responsible for the overall consolidation of all sales activities in South Asia across channels and OEMs. Ravi manages Intel World Ahead Program across South Asia and the program is aimed at connecting the next billion with Accessibility, Connectivity, Content and Education as the mail pillars. R Ravichandran, Director – Sales INTEL SOUTH ASIA Q What were the challenges and business problems that led to implementation of this project? Under the Intel World Ahead Program at Baramati, our key objective has been to enhance the quality of life by integrating key pillars such as Accessibility, Connectivity, Content and Education. These pillars deliver benefits through technology-based solutions in socioeconomic growth. The issues and challenges during the course of implementation were; Creation of a robust model for ICT implementation at the community level, and building an industry ecosystem for smooth and efficient execution. Q What were the key benefits gained after having deployed this project? Use of technology will increase the quality of life proving affordable health care and remote diagnostics from specialized hospitals through Internet, enabling educated rural population and people empowerment.

School Health Monitoring System
This usage model addresses the issue of malnutrition among children in India by identifying undernutritioned children and providing them and their parents correct dietary directions. School Health Monitoring System is a Web-based solution which provides children faculty benefits such as digitized health records and health camps with participatory, action-based health learning etc. The solution helps to keep track of basic health parameters of students according to WHO provided age metrics. A central online database is created for all students and a 'health card' is provided to every student.

A health scout is assigned for every 30 students which in turn is assisted by teachers. They are trained to check the height, weight, common signs and symptoms of nutritional deficiencies and data entry.

The observations are noted down on the health card of every student and uploaded to the central server.

ICT training by Self Help Groups VIIT manages 200 computer training centers in more than 110 Taluks in Maharashtra. These centers are run by women entrepreneurs from Local Self Help Groups. Each center usually has 3-5 PCs which are used to provide computer literacy to women from the surrounding community for an affordable fee of Rs 165/-. Approximately 10,000 women have been trained so far.

Intel Teach Program
Under this program Intel trains teachers to be more effective educators by training them on how to integrate technology into their lessons, promoting problem solving, and critical thinking and collaboration skills among their students. So far 500 teachers have been trained through this program across 15 schools in Baramati benefiting thousands of students.

Implementation Partner

Amol Goje, Director VIIT The main implementation partner for Baramati is Vidyaprathisthan Institute of Information Technology (VIIT). The tele-diagnostic facility is driven by VIIT, Intel, SN Informatics working along with Schiller Healthcare. Under Self Help Group usage model, Intel and VIIT are working together in training women of the Self Help Groups, who can impart training to women across the rural areas in the state of Maharashtra. VIIT is also responsible for maintaining all computer training centers of Self help groups. One of the major challenges in this project was to provide training manual and certificates in local language i.e marathi. For school health monitoring usage model, the application was developed by TCS. While TCS has helped the volunteers with the software and data entry training, Intel and VIIT provided the computer and Internet facilities to the students. The self-sustainable programme has been implemented with the help of students and teachers.

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