This technology can ensure that even the poorest have the right to an identity within health systems.
- Toby Norman
A pocket-sized fingerprint scanner that links individuals' fingerprints to their health records has been created by a team of students and has the potential for widespread health benefits, according to a new study.
In an article in the peer-review journal Global Health: Science and Practice, four students - three of them Gates Cambridge Scholars - outline how SimPrints addresses a major problem in developing countries: the inability to uniquely identify clients impedes access to services and contributes to inefficiencies. The scanner works by wirelessly syncing with a health worker's smartphone.
The students - Daniel Storisteanu, Alexandra Grigore and Toby Norman from the University of Cambridge and Tristram Norman from the Royal Holloway, University of London - say the benefits of the SimPrints system include high accuracy and secure identification, fast access and modification of records, allowing health workers in the field to make better decisions by providing immediate and reliable access to critical medical information, increasing programme accountability by facilitating the measurement of indicators such as vaccination coverage and supporting civil registration and vital statistics systems by enabling tracking of vital events (such as births).
In areas where connectivity in the field is poor, the students say the SimPrints system can access and modify offline health records that have been previously downloaded and are stored in a local database on the phone. Any updates to the health records will then be synced with the central database once Internet connectivity is restored. In order to increase access to charging points and make it easier to replace parts, the SimPrints scanner uses the same BL-5C Nokia batteries commonly used in mobile phones globally.
They say challenges remain in fingerprint identification of infants, the elderly, and individuals with worn fingerprints due to manual labour. Current strategies used to prevent the exclusion of services to these individuals include connecting an infant's record to the fingerprints of their legal guardians and enrolling multiple fingerprints for manual labourers and the elderly to increase matching accuracy, as well as using secondary identification tags, such as their name or location, as a back-up.
Supported by funding from the Saving Lives at Birth innovation grant and ARM Ltd, the SimPrints team are conducting a pilot study in partnership with BRAC and the Johns Hopkins Global mHealth Initiative to test the system with health workers in Gaibandha, Bangladesh. The study is focusing on threshold testing to assess false positive, false negative, and failure-to-enroll rates, and research on performance analysis, usability, acceptability, usage patterns, and key health indicators such as the number of successful antenatal health visits. The technology is also being piloted in Mozambique.
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Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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