CityLab: How Motorcyclists Navigate Lesothos’ Mountains to Deliver Health Care

A mobile app developed by a team at Cornell Tech including Jacobs Institute professor Nicola Dell and Connective Media student Sean Herman aims to help motorcycling health care workers in Lesotho, Africa digitally track medical samples the collect, CityLab reports.

But Herman and his team at Cornell Tech, led information scientist Nicola Dell, have developed a mobile app aimed at helping health workers digitally track the samples. Each group of samples is assigned a barcode, which makes it possible to track information including what clinic it came from and what tests are needed. At every stage of the transport process, the information gets updated. When riders scan the code with their phones, the stats are uploaded onto a web server that will help Riders for Health monitor the workflow.

The team is preparing to launch a pilot program with a few of the riders before handing it off the to Lesotho’s ministry of health for a nationwide rollout. When it finally is in place, Herman says, they should be able to see where the bottlenecks are in the transport process. “The hope is that by understanding where the delays are, they can improve turnaround times.”