Project
Handhelds for Health is an initiative to replace India’s traditional pen-and-paper disease surveillance system with mobile technology, aiming to help more than 130,000 government health workers report data from a rural population of over 700 million in near real-time. The project sought to plug into the Government of India’s Integrated Disease Surveillance Programme, addressing chronic problems with the paper-based system such as duplicated effort, inaccurate data, delayed outbreak detection and slow medical response times, echoing Google.org CEO Dr Larry Brilliant’s view that early detection and early response are key to controlling the spread of communicable disease.