Sendinel

End of our Bachelor Project - but not the End of Sendinel

2010-06-24T10:00:00.000+02:00

During the last nine months we have been developing Sendinel as part of our graduation. Now this project ends, but even though we will not be involved with the same intensity anymore, the development of Sendinel will hopefully continue.

The system is still used in the clinic where we deployed it some months ago. More clinics are currently investigating the possible deployment. A company from South Africa is interested in taking care of the development. So Sendinel will continue to grow and help people.

If you want to participate just start developing and share your progress with contact@sendinel.org .
We are excited about the future of Sendinel and hope you as well.

Video on Sendinel now also in English

2010-06-04T14:36:00.003+02:00

The movie, which our institute has shot about the development of Sendinel, is now also available in English. So enjoy!

Release of Sendinel Version 0.3

2010-05-27T17:08:00.000+02:00

Today we release a new version of Sendinel. As usual it is available for download on our project page and we have also updated the demo system.

In this release we have made final adjustments of the system. For example when you want to register a patient for a missing medicine, it is now possible to immediately add the missing medicine to the list.
We have also written a Developer Documentation (html|pdf). We think it is a great starting point for everyone who wants to start extending Sendinel with own code.

We encourage everyone to continue working with and on Sendinel. We provide documentations for developers and users, an installation guide and a solid code base which should make it easy for interested people to get going.

This release is going to be the last one from our team since we will now focus on writing our bachelor thesis.

Bachelorpodium and Project Poster

2010-05-27T16:05:00.012+02:00

Every year all bachelor projects from the Hasso-Plattner-Institut present their results at the Bachelorpodium. We will also present Sendinel there. The Bachelorpodium takes place on July 2nd starting 16:00 MESZ at the Hasso-Plattner-Institut in Potsdam, Germany. You can follow the Bacherlorpodium on a live stream at the tele-taching platform provided by the Hasso-Plattner-Institut: http://www.tele-task.de.

We also have prepared a poster which describes Sendinel and its use cases. The text is written in german, because the Bachelorpodium is also held in German.

Related Projects

2010-05-26T13:55:00.010+02:00

In this post we would like to refer to other projects who work on the same topic like Sendinel. All projects are Open Source Software and focus on developing countries.

OpenMRS is an electronic medical record system, where the patients' data is saved and processed in the hospital. They are working on a messaging module, which will allow the patient and the hospital to communicate by using mobile phones.

ResultsSMS works on secure delivery of test results to the patients via SMS.

FrontlineSMS focuses on delivering and analyzing bulk SMS.

TxtAlert sends SMS to remind patients of appointments.

So let's see what is similar and what is different in these projects.
The core idea of Sendinel (notifying and reminding patients) is very similar to TxtAlert. ResultsSMS focuses solely on delivering test results. Sendinel does not support that but only sends the notification that test results are ready to be picked up. Therefore ResultsSMS puts much more emphasis on security questions than Sendinel.

OpenMRS is supporting the complete hospital workflow from patients entering the hospital to leaving it again. Sendinel on the other hand only tackles the sending of information. FrontlineSMS is a very generic solution that is not specially tailored to the hospital use case.

In contrast to all the other projects Sendinel supports not only SMS but also VoiceCalls or Bluetooth as alternative ways of communication.

As you can see, the area of mobile communication in the health sector is something a lot of people see potential in and actually take effort to work on. We are proud to be able to contribute to this sector.

Please feel free to add more projects in the comments.

Video on Sendinel at HPI-TV

2010-05-20T12:00:00.000+02:00

Our institute has made a movie about the development of Sendinel. You can see the video below. Unfortunately it is in German only at the moment, but we hope to be able to provide an English version in the near future.

Release of Sendinel Version 0.2

2010-05-19T15:00:00.000+02:00

Today we have released Sendinel 0.2. There are a few new features:

You can now put patients on waiting lists for medicine
Bluetooth has been added to the ways of communication
Authentication can be switched on

Medicine Waiting Lists
We have added a new feature group, the waiting lists for medicine.

When the clinic is out of stock for a medicine and some patient should get it, the patient can be assigned to the waiting list. If the medicine arrives at the clinic, the clinic staff can send a message to all patients who are currently waiting for it.

Bluetooth
Up till now patients could be contacted using sms or phone calls. When it comes to appointment reminders however, you could also just use calendar entries to remind them. So from this release on you can also push calendar entries on the patients' mobile phones to remind them of their appointment. This option is an especially good extension to the other ways of communication, since it doesn't generate any costs at all.
If you do not want to use Bluetooth, it can be switched off via the settings.py.

Authentication
If you want to make sure, that the patients can really be reached under the telephone number they told you, you can switch on authentication. Then every time that the patients' phone number has to be entered, the patient is asked to authenticate the number. In order to do so, the patient has to ring the number of the SIM card that sticks in the UMTS-stick. If Sendinel recognizes an incoming call with the same number as told by the patient, the number is authenticated.
Sendinel does not answer the call of the patient, so this feature does not generate any costs for the patient.

The release can be found on the project page. You can check out the current version on our live demo system. Of course the user manual (html|pdf) and the installation instructions (html|pdf) are revised as well.

This release is the last release with new features from the bachelor project team in its current form. We hope however that Sendinel will continue to exist and be further developed by other people. It looks very good right now that this will happen.

What do you need to install Sendinel?

2010-05-18T14:50:00.004+02:00

If you want to install Sendinel, you need to meet a few hardware requirements.

A Computer
A 3G USB UMTS stick "Huawei K3520"
A SIM-card with airtime

First of all, there has to be at least one computer where the system runs on (also known as the server). This computer can be a laptop or a desktop computer or an industry server. When we deployed Sendinel in Agincourt, we used a plug computer. This is a very cheap and small server which doesn't look like a computer at all but supports everything needed to run Sendinel. Sendinel runs best on Linux.

The server needs the 3G UMTS stick "Huawei K3520", also known as E169. This UMTS stick is the only stick known to us which works well with the Asterisk server to properly send SMS and phone calls in the local telecommunication networks.

In the UMTS stick, you need to have a working SIM-card with airtime on it.

When you have all this, you can install Sendinel and use it on the computer.

You can also use Sendinel on more computers like Laptops in the consultation rooms. We call these computers "terminal computers". All terminal computers connect to the server via a network like wifi using their browser, so usually there is no extra software needed. If you want to use the Bluetooth feature, the terminal computers need to have Bluetooth.

Sendinel blog post on ict4d.at

2010-05-18T13:18:00.005+02:00

ICT4D.at is an "Austrian Network for Information and Communication Technolgies for Development". It aims at contributing to the international ict4d-movement by starting projects and reporting about activities in that field. They also write a blog and we have been featured with a guest post there, where we give an overview of Sendinel. The post can be found here.

Background of the Sendinel Project

2010-05-12T12:00:00.002+02:00

In this blog post we want to introduce our group and explain the background of the Sendinel Project.

Our team during the research trip in South Africa

The Sendinel development team consist of the seven people you can see on the picture above. We are 7 Bachelor students at the Hasso Plattner Institute.

The Institute is associated with the University of Potsdam and was founded by Hasso Plattner, who is also one of the founders of SAP. The course of studies is called IT-Systems Engineering, which is very similar to Computer Science, but focuses more on practical experiences and engineering. This is also why a crucial part of the graduation process is the so-called bachelor project.

A bachelor project lasts about a 9 months and is conducted by a group of students, who work on it half-time in the beginning and full-time in the last months. The objective of the project is to find and develop a solution for problems in the real world. We have started developing Sendinel in September 2009 and will finish the project in July 2010, when we will graduate as Bachelors of Science as well.

Through the project we had the opportunity to learn how to organize and execute a software project. We gained insight in official communication flows and learned more about the South African health system. We are happy with the outcome and hope that we will find somebody to continue the development.

Live Demo System

2010-05-11T15:16:00.006+02:00

Today we have released a demo version of Sendinel. You can access it at http://demo.sendinel.org.

Please click around and get a feeling of the current state which Sendinel is in. The actual message sending is disabled in this version so you can test without doing anything wrong.

First Release of Sendinel

2010-05-06T16:10:00.000+02:00

We are happy to announce that after over half a year of research and development today we finally released the first version of Sendinel.

The current release features notifications and reminders as well as messages that can be sent to single or groups of patients. You can see the system in action here in a screencast:

There is also a detailed User Guide available as html and pdf.

To download the actual application, please go to this download page, where you can also find the requirements and detailed installation instructions (html|pdf).

Feel free to contact us at contact [at] sendinel.org, follow us on Twitter, subscribe to our blog or watch the repository on GitHub.

And please spread the word about this release since we are still searching for people who want to participate in the development of Sendinel or implement it at their clinic.

How does Sendinel work right now?

2010-04-22T11:41:00.011+02:00

Actually, we have not yet talked about the whole concept of Sendinel. So it’s time to do that!

Sendinel generally aims to improve the communication between clinics and patients. Clinics are the entrance point to the South-African health system. If somebody is sick, that person goes to a clinic and is examined and treated by a nurse. On a regular basis, specialists visit the clinic (for example once a week). If the person has to be operated, the person is transferred to the hospital. Clinics are free of charge for all patients. So what we want to do is to help the clinic staff contacting the patients. The supported communication channel will be SMS or computer-generated phone calls to the patients’ mobile phones.

Patients can receive information from the clinic via SMS and Phone Call

We focus on 4 main use cases:
• When lab results arrive, patients should be informed that they can come to the clinic to pick them up.
• Sometimes people forget appointments they have with the clinic. Appointments are given to chronic patients or for vaccinations (especially for children). When the appointments are forgotten, the intake of medicine may be interrupted or there may be no vaccination. So the clinic staff can set-up a reminder in Sendinel. One day before the appointment, the patient will be reminded of the appointment.
• It sometimes happens that not enough medicine is present at the clinic. So when the medicine arrives the clinic should be able to inform all patients who are waiting for it.
• The clinic sometimes wants to inform a larger group of people about the same topic. For example, all pregnant women should be informed about a gymnastics training. So they can create an information group "information for pregnant women" and subscribe all pregnant women to it. Then all subscribers will receive the messages that the clinic staff writes to that information group.

Right now our main menu looks like this:

We plan to release Sendinel on the 5th of May with all the above described features.

A more formal description of the features is available at Google Docs here and in pdf format here.

The research trip to South Africa

2010-04-21T13:47:00.008+02:00

As mentioned earlier we have been on a research trip to the Agincourt clinic in Mpumalanga, South Africa from March 21 to March 29 2010. Following is a summary of the trip and the conclusions we made.

What we have done
At the first day, we set up the Sendinel server and connected it to the local network. This enabled us to conduct our user research under the proper conditions.

We tested how users react to Sendinel and tried to find out which features were accepted by the patients and staff. Furthermore we evaluated various input methods and the understandability of computerized voice calls. We also tested the reminder service. Sendinel informs patients about their next appointment at the clinic via their mobile phone.

Since many languages are spoken in South Africa (there are 11 official langauges), we tried to find out which languages should be supported by systems used in that region. We also interviewed all participants about their usage of technology. In total, about 60 people participated in our user research.

On the last day we made Sendinel available from all computers at the clinic and trained the nurses on how to use it. For example we showed them how to send messages to groups of subscribers like informing all pregnant women if a gynecologist is going to be at the clinic.

Conclusions
Generally all participants were excited about the possibility to remind patients of appointments and vaccinations.

The interviews with the patients of the clinic showed, that nearly everyone owns a mobile phone. We also learned that internet usage is not widely spread. So we decided to focus on contacting patients via SMS or telephone calls.

During user research we realized that only the nurses of the clinic are trained well enough to use the computer. A lot of the patients that participated in our tests had never used a computer before. Therefore we decided that the target users of our system should not be the patients themselves, but the clinic staff.

We had previously planned to provide the patients with a knowledge base holding health related information. Since patients are no longer our target user group, we decided to drop that part.

The clinic staff speaks English fluently, so this is what we chose as the main language for Sendinel. However it can easily be adapted to other languages. For example in Agincourt we are considering to send messages to the patients in Tsonga, the local language.

What happens next?
We are preparing to release Sendinel as an Open Source project in May 2010. In the process, we will use the information gathered during the research trip to improve the system. We also plan to further engage third parties to pursue the development of Sendinel after the end of the bachelor project in June 2010.

You may also view and download a more formal version of this travel report in pdf format here.

Sendinel will run on a SheevaPlug

2010-03-09T15:55:00.011+01:00

We are happy to announce that during our research trip to South Africa, the Sendinel server will run on a SheevaPlug, which is a very small and cost-effective computer. It follows the Plug Computer concept.

We have two devices (on the picture together with the USB-UMTS sticks). The SheevaPlugs were generously provided by Dr. Bott KG.

We plan on running the Sendinel server on a SheevaPlug and access it via an additional terminal computer like a laptop.

The advantage for us is that we can already set-up everything here in Germany before the journey. The small dimension of the SheevaPlug allows us to take it with us in our luggage and just "plug it in" on-site. For accessing the web frontend only a computer with a browser and network access is needed.

Another advantage of the SheevaPlug is it's very low power consumption. This is especially important in an environment where electricity is an expensive good.

Thanks again to Dr. Bott KG for supporting Sendinel with the SheevaPlugs. We will put them to good use.

Preparing our research trip to South Africa

2010-03-02T14:54:00.000+01:00

The hot phase in developing the initial version of Sendinel has started some weeks ago. We, the seven bachelor students from the HPI in Potsdam/Germany, work full-time on Sendinel now until the end of June. This means that we can focus fully on shipping a good and meaningful end product. If you want to follow the development in code feel free to watch our open Github repository. And watching the network graph is hopefully going to give you a good understanding of the speed with which we are progressing currently.

Our aim for the first big milestone is to implement a feature set which enables us to do user testing. That is going to happen on a research trip to South Africa from March 23rd to March 28th 2010, where our whole team will try to get first-hand feedback from the users. We will also do user studies on the working environment there. This will hopefully give us a good understanding of the conditions and needs of the users.

The research trip will take us to the Living Lab of SAP in Mpumalanga near the Kruger National Park in the east of South Africa.
This video by SAP provides a good inside view of the Living Lab.

This map shows the location of one of the clinics:

Bigger Map

In the next weeks we will post more information on the trip preparation and the project progress.

Approaching the first Milestone

2010-03-01T15:30:00.016+01:00

Some weeks ago we have started implementing Sendinel and we think it is time now to share some information about the first milestone which is due in the middle of March.

The basic idea of our system is to improve the communication between a hospital or clinic and it's patients. For this a computer system will be on-site. It can be used by the patients of the clinic to achieve the following tasks:

Appointment reminders Patients can schedule reminders e.g. for follow-up examinations or medication pick-up. The reminders will be sent via SMS or Voice Call and a calendar entry can be pushed to the patient's mobile phone via Bluetooth.

Notifications Patients can sign-up for being notified about subjects like events in the hospital or when specialist are present. The notifications can be sent by the hospital staff via SMS or Voice Call.

Information display Videos, texts and pictures can be accessed by the patients.

A Voice Call is an automatically created call conducted by a text-to-speech engine.

A first release version is not due until April but we are committed to deliver a package easy to install and well-documented then. If you want to be on the cutting edge, you are welcome to clone directly from the GitHub repository. The master and develop branches reflect the current state of the project ...

We are online

2010-01-22T16:55:00.005+01:00

We are a group of 7 bachelor students at the Hasso-Plattner-Institute Potsdam in Germany. We are working together in a bachelor project team as part of our bachelor thesis. Our topic is „Healthcare Education for Africa“ and we are building a system called "Sendinel" which aims on improving the communication between hospitals and their patients in rural South-Africa.

Sendinel is going to be built with Python and Django and will be made available under an Open-Source License.

In the coming weeks more information on the projects concept is going to be published here. We are also going to inform about implemented and coming features. And of course running versions of the system are going to announced and free for download here as soon as possible.

Feedback and contribution is highly appreciated.
We are looking forward to making a difference.

The Sendinel Team

Fltr: Thomas, Philipp, Daniel, Michael, Patrick, Lea, Johan