InSTEDD - Innovative Support to Emergencies Diseases and Disasters

iLab Latin America + UNICEF Map Social Risks in Haiti

2013-04-24T20:15:57-07:00

Building on the success of the digital mapping project in Brazil, our iLab Latin America applied the same concept to problem solving in Haiti. While our work in Brazil revolved around the surveying of potential social and environmental dangers, the work in Haiti focused on detecting risk factors associated with HIV/AIDS, sexually transmitted diseases, sexual and reproductive health, and gender violence.

Mapping and Port au Prince : Map PaP

Haitian adolescents in their first workshop

The project Map Pap has been implemented in collaboration with UNICEF and two local NGOs: GHESKIO (Groupe Haïtien d’Etude du Sarcome de Kaposi et des Infections Opportunistes) and ONAVC (Observatoire National de la Violence et de la Criminalité), with the main purpose of giving the adolescents of Port au Prince universal access to healthcare.

These adolescents have already learned to overcome many adversities — a catastrophic earthquake, the constant threat of AIDS and a virulent outbreak of cholera — as a testament to their strength and resilience to bad times.

Haitian adolescents learning to use mobile technological tools to collect information

Map PaP started in two neighborhoods of Port au Prince: Village de Dieu and Citê Plus, training thirty adolescents to survey and map risks related to HIV/AIDS. They used mobile technologies to collect information that helps support problem solving.

They identified both positive and negative factors. Positive factors include health centers, water supply points, drug stores and well lit areas. Negatives factors include dark alleys, abandoned houses, contaminated latrines and poor hygiene conditions (garbage, dead animals, etc.). Once the youth collect this information about their communities, it is then analyzed, in another workshop organized by UNICEF and local NGOs. The objective is to identify patterns and trends that allow them to create a comprehensive program of services for the community that help to mitigate the risks.

Haiti’s Health

Only half of the children in Haiti are vaccinated and only 40% have access to basic health care. Before the earthquake in 2010, the primary causes of death were attributed to HIV/AIDS, respiratory infections, meningitis and diseases such as diarrhea, cholera and typhoid fever. 90% of Haiti’s children suffer from intestinal parasites and other diseases related to water pollution and 5% of adults are HIV positive.

According to a 2006 UNICEF report, more than 200,000 children have lost one or both parents because of HIV and only 20% knew how to protect themselves from it. In addition, the poverty and political instability of Haiti has left the kids of Haiti in a vulnerable position in the face of domestic and armed violence, exploitation and abuse.

Port au Prince — June 2012

InSTEDD’s Relationship With Haiti

It is very significant for the InSTEDD team to work in Haiti again as we were on location to help as soon as the tragic earthquake happened in 2010. To learn more about what our work in Haiti in 2010, watch this video presentation we gave at Google headquarters in Mountain View, California. Since we’ve come back to work on this digital mapping project, we’ve found communities that stand out for their strength and the capacity to overcome many adversities.

We are honored to be a part of such a novel initiative as we believe we are on track to scale and replicate the social impact created by investing in the next generation of leaders. We look forward to brining you more details about the growth of this initiative.

MORE INFORMATION

For more information on this project, please explore the following links:

Digital Mapping in Haiti
Watch a video about this project here.

iLab Latin America Blog Post (in Spanish):
Read a blog post (in Spanish) from the InSTEDD iLab Latin America here.

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Verboice in Cambodia: Using the Power of Voice for Social Impact

2013-04-16T07:00:40-07:00

Voice to voice interaction remains the most effective and primary form of human communication for both health care service providers and vulnerable groups who live in rural Cambodia. Due to poor network connectivity and literacy barriers, rural Cambodians are inhibited from using many technologies. While many people in rural Cambodia have access to mobile phones, literacy and Khmer language support on mobile devices is still limited. This poses a significant barrier to using SMS based mobile applications and makes voice based systems a more desirable alternative.

Interactive Voice Response Systems and the Future of Cambodia

Voice is the most universal and inclusive means of communication, and it’s an ideal way to expand the reach and impact of health and humanitarian technologies. In September 2012, with funding from Spider (The Swedish Program for ICT in Developing Regions), the InSTEDD iLab Southeast Asia introduced and extended Verboice, an open-source tool which specializes in using interactive voice response (IVR) to support health, safety and sustainable development work. Verboice projects can start small and scale up, making it possible to improve lives even in communities previously closed off by literacy and technological barriers. Below are a few of the projects to come out of this grant.

Verboice + Open Institute & Women’s Media Centre

InSTEDD iLab Southeast Asia partnered with the Open Institute, and the Women’s Media Centre to improve their outreach services which focus on women’s health, gender-based violence, and democracy. The project is to assist the Women’s Media Centre and Open Institute in implementing a series of mobile-based information telephone hotlines, scheduled advice services and question boxes for women that complement and extend their current work. Through a customized version of Verboice, women and children will be able to access on demand health information services, therefore increasing their awareness and understanding of health issues they may be at risk for. For more information on this project, check out the Spider website here.

Verboice + International Labor Organization (ILO)

In addition to supporting women’s health, we are working on a project with the International Labour Organization (ILO) to support factory workers throughout Cambodia. Better Factories Cambodia (BFC) helps to monitor and improve working conditions in Cambodia’s export garment factories.

Verboice enables ILO’s Better Factories Cambodia to connect directly with factory workers and help them better understand their rights. Using Verboice, BFC has developed a quiz, which allows garment factory workers to call in to the system to answer several questions related to salaries, work safety and personal health.

Verboice + Marie Stopes International

Cambodia is infamous for having one of the highest number of maternal deaths and disability in Asia. Many Cambodian women have limited access to reliable and modern family planning methods, which results in high rates of unwanted pregnancies. All too often, women believe that dangerous and extreme measures are their only options. The result is that 25% of all maternal deaths in Cambodia are the result of unsafe, unregistered and unscrupulous abortion providers.

Based on the belief that when individuals are empowered to be decision makers in their own reproductive health destiny, they are able to live happier, healthier and more prosperous lives, Marie Stopes International Cambodia helps to increase access to high quality, safe and affordable reproductive and sexual health services. Marie Stopes International Cambodia provides comprehensive safe abortion care and has the highest rates of post abortion family planning uptake in Cambodia.

Marie Stopes is using Verboice as part of their post abortion follow-up process. This IVR is used as an educational resource to ensure that women have access to more information about safer alternative contraception options.

Verboice + BBC Media Action

For the past 10 years, BBC — Media Action has used media channels such as TV and radio to improve health throughout Cambodia. Their projects have tackled maternal and child health issues, HIV and AIDS and malaria.

Funded by UNDP and implemented by the BBC Media Action, Loy9 is an entertaining and inspiring mass media campaign on TV, radio, online and print, which focuses on engaging youth in local and national decision making.

As an extension to the TV, radio and online presence, we are working with BBC Media Action to customize Verboice to support Loy9 to empower youth’s social involvement through on demand content accessible through mobile phones.

Let Verboice Support Your Projects

We believe that by creating systems that allow anyone, regardless of their access to sophisticated technologies, to participate in the conversation supports true creativity and innovation. Through voice, we are all equal.

Learn more about Verboice here and don’t hesitate to contact us if you have an idea for how Verboice can support your IVR needs.

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TB Technology in Kenya in 3 Steps

2013-03-19T05:00:53-07:00

InSTEDD is proud to announce the launch of a new project! The Kenya TB Tech project brings together mHealth and eHealth solutions to improve tuberculosis (TB) care for people living with HIV.

Because their immune systems are so vulnerable, people living with HIV have a 20 times higher risk of dying from tuberculosis than anyone else. Thriving in the wake of the HIV pandemic, tuberculosis is a disease that has gone from near-extinction to being one of the world’s most common and deadly conditions. According to WHO, TB is one of the top causes of death among women and children in the world (WHO, 2011). An estimated 14 million people worldwide are infected with active TB.

But there is hope. Research now confirms that people can take a simple daily pill — isoniazid preventative therapy (IPT) — to protect themselves from TB during the months in which their immune systems are most vulnerable. The WHO now recommends that all people living with HIV who don’t have tuberculosis already should be given access to these life saving pills. But sadly, it is estimated that among 33 million people living with HIV worldwide, only 1.7 million (5%) have been tested for TB and only about 85,000 (0.2%) were offered TB preventive therapy.

That’s where the TB Tech project comes in. InSTEDD and its partners at Kijani, Population Council, and AMPATH-Kenya are working to design, develop, implement, and evaluate information and communication technologies to improve TB care among people living with HIV. As an initial phase of this project, our team is focused on a TB care reminder system. This reminder system uses information from patient electronic medical records (OpenMRS) to give medical providers the right reminders at the right time about what they can do during each patient visit to improve TB diagnosis and prevention among their patients.

This project takes place in 3 stages.

1. Design: Using techniques from User-Centered Design, we are creating the best reminder system possible using iterative input from key stakeholders and providers in Kenyan clinics and hospitals. Part of this involves engaging users early and often during the design process. This started with long conversations and meetings in January. And, between now and May, we will engage users in usability testing to make sure that our reminders are accurate, effective, and satisfying to busy clinicians working in very resource-constrained settings.

2. Deploy: In June/July, we will launch our system across dozens of clinics across Western Kenya, from one-room buildings with corrugated tin roofs to three-story regional hospitals.

3. Evaluate impact: Using a cluster-randomized clinical trial, we will measure the impact of the TB Tech reminder system to determine how many more people living with HIV are tested for TB and start preventative therapies. Ultimately, the more people who get this preventative medication, the more who will be saved from TB and from the illness and death that so often follows.

But, we are just getting started. Check out this travel log (above) from our first trip to Kenya, collecting stories, ideas, and information from the patients, providers, and local leaders.

Updates to come!

Caricia Catalani

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Barcamp Yangon 2013: A Personal Experience

2013-02-26T00:49:33-08:00

BY: CHANNE SUY

Last month, my colleague at the iLab Southeast Asia and I were fortunate enough to attend BarCamp Yangon. This was my second time participating in the event focused on spreading ICT knowledge throughout the country. As part of the international network of BarCamp conferences, or rather “unconferences” as organizers refer to it, people from a variety of different backgrounds and geographies come together to create user-generated sessions focused primarily on technology and the web.

While Myanmar is not well known for their technological capacity, they are still responsible for putting on the largest BarCamp events in history. People come from all over the world to participate and I was happy to see lots of international participants (much more than when I was last here in 2011) as well as participants from high tech companies like Google and Firefox. Having such a diverse community allowed me to connect with local Burmese startups as well as both local and international developers and BarCampers.

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Using Verboice with Skype

2013-02-12T15:48:44-08:00

A month ago I posted a few tutorials on how to get started with Verboice, our tool to create voice applications (IVR).

The easiest way to test and play with your call flows is to use what we call a "Skype Channel". This will give Verboice a regular phone number from which it can receive and make calls to mobile phones and landlines. The name of the feature in Skype that provides that is called Skype Connect. It supports up to 300 simultaneous calls, so you can use this setup in a real scenario without any issues.

This video will show you how to set this up under your Verboice account.

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Help Shape our Internship Program

2013-01-29T17:09:21-08:00

An Opportunity: InSTEDD + Presidio School of Management

Part of the advantage of being based in the San Francisco Bay Area is that we are in the same physical location as some of the world’s top innovators. The energy, knowledge and commitment that so many of them bring to their work is an incredible source of inspiration, as well as an opportunity for organizations like ours.

One of the ways that we’ve taken advantage of the collaboration opportunities is through our work with the Presidio School of Management. What is innovative about the Presidio is that they offer both MBA and MPA programs which focus heavily on sustainability. Yes, you read that correctly. It’s a business school focused on creating positive social impact through sustainability oriented business principles! Among the world’s first and leading sustainability graduate schools, Presidio was founded on the simple premise that we inhabit a world increasingly defined by our shared destiny, not our differences, where private enterprise and the public sector, commerce and the common good, are companions, not competitors. Considering our shared values, we decided to reach out to them about possible collaborations.

Luckily for us, the Presidio also saw a good match. Last year, we worked with a team of MPA students for a semester through their Experiential Learning Program. The university believes that the best way to learn is by doing. That’s why their students partner with external organizations like InSTEDD to create a custom-made project based on the unique needs of their partner. The project we chose to work on together was to develop a pilot for a Fellowship Program. With the support and dedication of the team of MPA students, we created a plan that we are hoping to implement by the end of 2013.

An Agile Human-Centered Approach to Internships

In order to expand our reach and prepare for the launch of our pilot Fellowship Program, we have decided to start off by bring on a select number of interns. We believe that there is an incredible opportunity to create a win-win partnership. By investing in an internship program we can engage an enthusiastic volunteer community in a way that supports our overall mission and vision in a cost effective way.

An interpretation of the panelist at The Hub Bay Area’s Career Fair, which included a sketch of InSTEDD Director of Communications, Brooke Estin.

As with all of our activities, we begin with an open mind and proceed with an agile and human centered design process. We believe the most effective programs and technologies are flexible and iterative and are built on joint participation of the communities they are meant to serve. We work in incremental and adaptive steps, side by side with partners and beneficiaries, to jointly design programs and technologies that have measurable impact. Whether we’re building tools or creating an internship program, our experience has taught us there there is not a one-size-fits-all model for success. That’s why we are looking to engage a handful of interns to co-create an internship program that simultaneously builds the intern’s capacity as well as supports InSTEDD’s overall strategy. We will work together to develop a personalized scope of work with a timeline of activities based on our combined schedules.

The InSTEDD Communications Internship

Can you imagine the impact of the coordination between NGO’s, foundations, and technology organizations to address the world’s most basic health and safety needs? Do you find yourself telling and sharing stories constantly? Are you ready to engage your philanthropic desires with your tech savvy know how to help us change the world? If you answered yes to these questions, then we encourage you to take a look at our current Communications Internship and apply without delay!

Click to Apply for the InSTEDD Communications Internship

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Verboice Tutorials — Part 1

2013-01-18T14:51:40-08:00

For the last two years we have been working hard on a new tool called Verboice to simplify the creation of voice-enabled applications.

Verboice is a free and open-source tool that makes it easy for anyone to create and run projects that interact via voice, allowing your users to listen and record messages in their own language and dialect or answer questions with a phone keypad.

To make it easier to get started, I created a few simple videos.

How to setup an account

How to create a "Hello World" application

In this video you will see how to use the "play" command.

How to create a "Health Tips" hotline

This video will teach you how to use the "menu" command and provide options that your users can press in their keypads to navigate your hotline.

I'll try to find time to create a few more videos to showcase the rest of the features (which are plenty!), but hopefully these will get you started.

Please join our discussion list if you have questions or you want to suggest ideas or features.

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The Art of Creating Useful & Usable Tools: Resource Map UX Testing

2013-01-07T23:18:39-08:00

post written by iLab Southeast Asia Software Developer, Kengsreng Tang

InSTEDD has an entire platform of free and open source technologies that help people quickly share valuable information around health, safety and development issues. Resource Map is one of the tools that we’ve developed that works either through the web or through SMS.

Resource Map is an application that allows users to geographically map their resources so that they are always aware of what they have currently and what they need more of. Users can update, query, receive alerts from the system and more simply by sending an SMS or updating the website online.

Click to go to the Resource Map Website: http://resourcemap.instedd.org/

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2012: A Year in Review

2013-01-02T17:24:03-08:00

In the wake of the New Year, we took some time to look back on the dynamic journey we took in 2012. Our activities were characterized by contributions to key global health efforts, engagement in several new projects and the development of important strategic partnerships. Our iLab Southeast Asia and iLab Latin America continued to develop their teams and capabilities as a regional leader for collaborative problem solving. We are delighted to share some of our remarkable achievements of 2012.

iLab Southeast Asia: Malaria Project in Laos
With funding from The Global Fund, the iLab Southeast Asia began working on a project for the Center for Malaria Parasitology and Entomology of Lao PDR (CMPE) to provide technical assistance in the development of an SMS system for malaria reporting. Find out how the iLab Southeast Asia is working towards early detection and early response of Malaria on our blog here.

Interactive Disease Diagnostics Platform with Cepheid
We began working with Cepheid to enhance global capabilities for real-time disease surveillance. By combining Cepheid’s transformative platform for molecular diagnostics (GeneXpert) with InSTEDD’s ability to design and develop ICT in low resource environments, we developed a platform that has the ability to both provide real-time diagnostic information as well as information about the diagnostics machine functionality itself. By improving the quality, speed and accessibility to information, national health systems are becoming better positioned to monitor diseases at both the national and individual levels.

iLab Latin America: Digital Mapping in Brazil
Through the iLab Latin America, we partnered with UNICEF, MIT and the Brazilian NGO CEDAPS, on a cutting-edge digital mapping project that enables real-time data collection through web and mobile applications. The main idea behind this project was to create a simple, low cost way to allow the youth living in the favelas to digitally map the social and environmental risk factors that threatened their communities. For more details on the process and the outcome, check out the project page on our website here.

iLab Southeast Asia: BarCamp Yangon, Myanmar
In February of 2012, members of the iLab Southeast Asia team traveled to Myanmar to participate in BarCamp Yangon. We have been a huge supporter of BarCamp Yangon since its inception and have sponsored several events and even hosted Mini-BarCamp events at the iLab Southeast Asia.

iLab Latin America: Digital Mapping in Haiti
Building on the success of the digital mapping project in Brazil, our iLab Latin America applied the same concept to problem solving in Haiti. While our work in Brazil revolved around the surveying of potential social and environmental dangers, the work in Haiti focused on detecting risk factors associated with HIV/AIDS, sexually transmitted diseases, sexual and reproductive health and gender violence. Learn more about this project and how the iLab Latin America can help you improve the scale and impact of your projects.

iLab Southeast Asia: Website
Our flagship innovation lab, the iLab Southeast Asia, officially launched an independent website to showcase the projects, networks, and regional collaboration opportunities. We highly encourage you to visit the new website and to reach out to the team to explore opportunities to work together on future projects.

Resource Map Update
As part of our ongoing efforts to improve the usability, usefulness and quality of our tools, we underwent a significant design enhancement to our Resource Map tool. The original tool was created by the team in the iLab Southeast Asia back in 2011 and as a result of many user testing sessions with partners and collaborators was revamped in 2012. The most notable of these user design enhancements is to support our ongoing work in Rwanda.

Verboice in Action
This was an important year for our interactive voice response tool, Verboice. An example of how our tool was used can be seen in Baby Monitor project as well as the interactive voice response (IVR) service behind the Motech Suite. In addition, the iLab Southeast Asia is working with SPIDER to develop and customized the Verboice application for the Open Institute, Women’s Media Center and the International Labor Organization. Learn more about Verboice here and how the iLab Southeast Asia can help you apply the power of scalable IVR capabilities to your project.

Rwanda Health Information System — Facility Registry
InSTEDD participated as part of a large public-private partnership to strengthen the health systems of Rwanda. This involved the creation of a national electronic medical record system that worked in conjunction with centralized registries of all health facilities, providers (doctors, nurses, etc) and patient indexes. All of this information was integrated together into an interoperable and shared Health Information Exchange. InSTEDD’s Resource Map was selected as the platform to serve as the Facility Registry. In addition, InSTEDD’s tools provided an open API to which NGOs and the private sector could connect to to use the facility information.

iLab Latin America: Finalist in Giving Women a Voice in their Health
The “She Will Innovate: Technology Solutions Enriching the Lives of Girls” challenge was designed to promote ICT solutions dedicated to improving the lives of women and girls. Intel Corporation and Ashoka Changemakers launched this online challenge. The iLab Latin America came in as a finalist in the competition by submitting our Baby Monitor project. Baby Monitor is a mobile phone application that takes clinical screening directly to women in the critical period before and after birth using interactive voice response technology via a mobile phone call. Learn more about this challenge here.

iLab Southeast Asia: Infectious Disease Reporting in Cambodia
Using InSTEDD’s GeoChat tool, disease reporting within Cambodia significantly improved by using real-time SMS to quickly share important information. Impressed by the success of GeoChat, the Operational District Lead approached the iLab Southeast Asia about developing a new tool that would allow the OD to filter disease reports by week and export the information into one spreadsheet. To support this idea, the iLab Southeast Asia developed a weekly reporting system that catches all the weekly reports from the health center level. This adds to the portfolio of biosurveillance tools that InSTEDD has built for general cases or to track specific diseases or conditions.

US CDC Notifiable Disease Platform
InSTEDD has been working with the Task Force for Global Health through a project with The Public Health Informatics Institute (PHII), and the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to enhance the electronic reporting system for notifiable diseases within the United States. The CDC collects millions of anonymized health records and with InSTEDD’s help they will be able to explore, analyze and visualize the information in an interactive way.

iLab Southeast Asia: HIV Patient Data Aggregation
We worked with the National Center for AIDS/HIV, Dermatology and STD (NCHADS) within the Cambodian Ministry of Health to create an application that allowed NCHADS to combine all the data from the HIV clinics into a centralized database. Simplifying data merging and allowing the export to statistical files helps NCHADS to analyze the information they receive to help their research teams improve treatment, care and processes. This is an example of custom solution development work carried out by the team leads in the iLab Southeast Asia. Learn more about this on our blog here.

iLab Southeast Asia: BarCamp Phnom Penh, Cambodia
In September 2012, the iLab Southeast Asia sponsored and participated in this year’s BarCamp Phnom Penh. At InSTEDD, we believe that developing an active community around open participation, user generated content, knowledge sharing and idea generation is essential for growing a local culture of idea generation, experimentation, and problem solving. You can read more about our involvement here.

iLab Southeast Asia: Phnom Penh Mapping Meetup
We participate in a number of events focused on idea development, problem solving, knowledge enhancement and community building as part of commitment to capacity building. One of these events is the Phnom Penh Mapping Meetup group. We come together once per month to talk about maps, GIS, surveying, distributed spatial computing, spatial databases, scripting and programming for GIS, positioning technologies such as GPS, remote sensing, crowdsourcing and cartography.

iLab Southeast Asia: Social Innovation Camp in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
In November, the iLab Southeast Asia sponsored and participated in the annual Social Innovation Camp, which was held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. At InSTEDD, we believe that developing an active community around open participation, user generated content, knowledge sharing and idea generation is essential for growing a local culture of innovation.

mHealth Zombie Game at UC Berkeley
With the goal of helping future public health innovators understand what it is like to be in an active outbreak scenario, we decided that we would do a simulation where InSTEDD’s mHealth tools would be valuable, but also create a fun and engaging event for the students. With that goal in mind, we set out to experiment with a fun and interactive environment for people to learn how our tools work and how significantly they can improve communications. we teamed up with UC Berkeley to create a public health simulation — using Zombies! Check out our blog post (with pictures) to learn more.

Health Informatics Public Private Partnership (HIPPP) Dashboard Indicator
The InSTEDD iLab Southeast Asia actively supports the Cambodian National Health Information Systems Strategic plan through a PEPFAR central grant. As part of this collaboration, InSTEDD has been providing NCHADS with adaptive technical assistance to support its strategies. The Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) Dashboard Indicator application was developed to provide the indicator information to health sites instantly either through the internet or for sites that do not have direct access to the web, the ability to use USB modems that they can connect online using the 3G cell phone network.

This past year was a pivotal year for InSTEDD full of exciting work. Through the design and development of mobile, scalable, user-centered and locally driven tools and services, we have been able to engage in a variety of projects, events and collaborations focused on what we feel are the most pressing global challenges in health, safety and sustainable development. We are excited to move into 2013 and look forward to sharing more about the evolution of our work!

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InSTEDD Tools Save the World from the Zombie Apocalypse!

2012-12-19T16:59:34-08:00

InSTEDD Tools Save the World from the Zombie Apocalypse!
UC Berkeley Game Teaches the Value of Real-Time Mobile Communications Tools

Working in the world of public health exposes us to a number of potentially life threatening scenarios. InSTEDD’s tools are designed to work in high stakes environments where people need to quickly share information, coordinate resources, and align their efforts towards the common goal of ensuring the public’s health and safety. In an effort to create a fun and interactive environment for people to learn how our tools work and how significantly they can improve communications, we teamed up with UC Berkeley to create a public health simulation — using Zombies!

Fortunately for us, Caricia Catalani, InSTEDD’s Senior Research Associate, is also faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Public Health. The focus of her work is on the development and evaluation of information technology and Web 2.0 tools for global health. She teaches about participatory new media and Web 2.0 tools for health research, intervention, and advocacy with underserved communities. With the goal of helping future public health innovators understand what it is like to be in an active outbreak scenario, we decided that we would do a simulation where InSTEDD’s mHealth tools would be valuable, but also create a fun and engaging event for the students.

Our goals were threefold:

Support interaction with our tools so that others can learn what/how/value
Exposure and advocacy so others will help spread the word about our work/tools
Learn from this experience so we can improve the process for future small scale events/pilots

Here is a short description of our original plan and what we prepared for the students:

Setting the Scene: Zombie Apocalypse

The Zombie Apocalypse is sweeping the globe. There are rumors of zombie sightings across UC Berkeley campus. Students of PH290 are the only hope for saving the campus and yes, the planet, from total zombie take-over. You and your classmates will form emergency response teams to investigate zombie outbreaks, deploy the zombie vaccine, and manage communications with your team and the global Zombie Eradication Network (ZEN). Tme is running out and all teams only have 1.5 hours to beat back the zombie threat. At exactly 3:30pm, the Zombie Apocalypse will be complete and humankind will be defeated, if your teams fail. If you win, however, the glory of a new dawn of humanity, built on collaboration and compassion, will be thanks to what you were able to achieve today. Also, there will be prizes that are beyond amazing.

Breaking into Teams: Investigators, Rescuers, & Communications

Zombie Outbreak Investigators: This team of zombie epidemiologists is deployed to assess the seriousness of the situation and determine the exact location of zombie outbreaks. Outbreak investigators are charged with an immensely important task and all other teams rely on you. You will get clues about the location of zombie outbreaks by calling the ZEN hotline (Verboice). Answer clues to find outbreak locations around campus and discover upon arrival whether or not the location is a real outbreak zone or a false alarm. Outbreak investigators will communicate the location of real outbreak zones to all of the other teams (GeoChat).

Zombie Rescue Team: This team of physicians, nurses, and frontline medical workers is deployed to zombie outbreak areas to distribute the lifesaving zombie vaccine. You will get clues about the location of zombie vaccine storehouses by calling the ZEN hotline (Verboice). Answer clues to find these locations around campus and discover upon arrival whether or not vaccines are still in stock. The rescue team will will communicate the location of vaccine storehouses to all of the other teams (GeoChat). Once you find them, the fate of humanity relies on your ability to bring vaccinations to zombie outbreak locations, communicated by the outbreak investigation team.

ZEN Command Center Communications Team: This team of computer engineers, gamers, and communications nerds is tasked with building and managing the zombie outbreak communications. Without you, field teams of investigators and rescuers will never identify and address the threat of zombie take-over before the 3:30pm end-of-humanity. You will receive messages from field teams and other ZEN experts from around the nation that you will need to communicate to the investigator and rescue teams. Nico di Tada, the global ZEN communications captain, escaped the total human annihilation in Seattle to join the last front in the fight against zombies, here in Berkeley. He is here to lead the effort but he needs your help.

Danger-zones

There are 5 danger-zones on campus, where zombie outbreaks are most serious, however teams will receive two false-alarm locations. You will know that you have found a danger-zone if you find Zombie police tape and Zombie signs. Look behind the zombie sign for a special numeric code. You will need to enter this code into Verboice to access the clues for locations 4 and 5. Make sure that danger-zones location information is communicated through GeoChat, so that others in ZEN teams can respond to this information.

Vaccination Storehouses

There are 2 vaccination storehouses on campus, where life saving anti-zombie vaccines (in giant syringes) can be collected and, then, brought to where they are needed most. You will know that you have found a danger-zone if you find Zombie police tape and a box of vaccine syringes. Look inside the box for a special numeric code. You will need to enter this code into Verboice to access the clue for location 2. Make sure that vaccination storehouse location information is shared through GeoChat, so that others in the ZEN teams can respond.

Using InSTEDD’s interactive voice response tool, Verboice, we were able to set up a call flow that went a little something like this:

Once the game was over, everyone returned to the classroom to discuss the student’s impressions on what worked, what we needed to improve on and how these tools could be used in an actual disease outbreak scenario. As in any emergency situation, many things did not go quite according to plan. For example, the students had only a surface level understanding of the tools and didn’t feel confident enough to use the tools at their full capacity.

As a final wrap up to the event, we asked the students a series of questions and held an active class discussion revolving aroudn the following questions:

What were the biggest technical challenges, counter-intuitive features, or collaboration difficulties?
What more would you like to know about the mHealth tools to use them more effectively?
What additional features or options would be useful in these tools?

Not only did we have a lot of fun experimenting with this game, we also learned a lot of valuable lessons for the future. Check out our event slideshow below and stay tuned on our blog for the next version of the game coming in 2013.

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