Monitoring power availability in healthcare facilities in low-resource settings

Monitoring power availability in healthcare facilities in low-resource settings

Sections : EL, MT, Energy, IC, PH, MTE

Place : Kenya or some partnering low-resource country of EssentialMed (such as Bangalore, India)

Duration : 2-6 months

Hosting structure :

EssentialMed – https://essentialmed.org/situation.htm

The availability of power in many low and middle-income countries (LMICs) is known to be a major challenge. This challenge is particularly crucial in health care facilities, where life-saving medical devices rely on this availability to enable patient care. And beyond the availability itself, the quality of the electrical is also critical, since voltage fluctuations, power spikes, harmonics and other disturbances are one of the main causes of medical devices failure. However, although the poor availability and quality of electrical power in these facilities is a well-known fact, it is still mostly reported via qualitative, subjective interviews, rather than through quantitative, objective measurements.

Project description :

The goal of this project is to implement a quantitative data collection on electrical power availability and quality in rural health care facilities in low and middle-income countries.
To do this, the first step will be to find the most appropriate device to be plugged into these facilities: many different types of network analyzers exist, and it is important to find the right balance between the device features, cost, robustness and ease of implementation in the context of this project.
The next step will be to identify a local partner in the targeted country/area (medical or technological partner). This partnership will allow to access the targeted facilities more easily, both on a cultural aspect and for administrative reasons, and to follow-up data collection, device retrieval etc… beyond the student’s stay in the country.
Once these preliminary steps are done, a field trip will be necessary to visit each facility, install the devices, make sure the devices work properly and the facility staff is aware of what the devices do.
Data collection could continue for up to one year (beyond the scope of this project).

Remark: Should travel to the targeted country be impossible due to covid, the student will have to rely more on the local partner. If enough devices are available, the study could be run in two (or more) countries in parallel. More time would be devoted to the identification of local partners and on the agreements with these partners, while the time needed to visit the facilities and to install the devices might be reduced (especially if the number of participating facilities in each country is reduced due to limited availability of measuring devices).

Required skills :

• Electrical engineering: Power, voltage, current measurement; design of simple electronic systems
• ICT: Data collection, storage, transmission and analysis
• Experience of developing countries, and their health system/market in particular

Accommodation : To discuss with local partners

Meals: To discuss with local partners

Contact :  Matthieu Gani – mga@essentialmed.org