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Remember the international student technology competition, Imagine Cup? The one in which the Brazilians swept the awards? Among the winners, the Virtual Dreams team took third place in the world in software design with the project Health Tag, which innovates the way we deal with our health. You’ll get to know it. Videos and an interview follow.

Health Tag is a system for supporting health care in remote areas. It allows easy identification of patients and access to patient records. Also, it stores statistical data to aid in research about the spread of disease and the effectiveness of health policies. Below,  a  back-and-forth about this new service, which will soon be available. I talked to Roberto Sonnino, of the Virtual Dreams team.

How does it work exactly? What does the patient do? What does the doctor do? What does the software do?

“The system has two parts: First, accessed by doctors, is like a traditional electronic medical record with desktop and mobile access, with some advantages: first, a more intuitive interface that is adapted to the way doctors use it and is extensible and customizable; second, a ‘cloud storage’ architecture, so that the data is stored on the web without site maintenance costs; and finally, we have an identification system based on Microsoft Tag that provides an affordable solution to improving data security in a mobile environment.”

“The second part of the system is the data analysis: it can be used by researchers and decision makers to create statistics and research on patient data (without any personal information being revealed). The main advantage of this module is that the data comes directly from the patient records, in a form which can support much more detailed research and lead to new conclusions. In addition, the module has a touchless interface that is low cost (and optional) that allows greater richness and collaboration in dealing with the data.”

In the project describtion, the team cited as challenges the need to respect medical ethics and develop an interface that adapts to medical use in remote areas. Is this a very intuitive interface? What were the ethical factors in question?

“The interface of the modules is customizable and extensible, that is, the doctor can configure it to study in detail some data in the medical record, or create new types of data to accomodate new information. In terms of ethics, we had to take into account security and privacy regarding patient data, which is very sensitive, and also the issue of publishing the data without personal identification.”

In the project description the team also said Health Tag is a solution adapted to the available infrastructure, and meets four of the eight Millenium Development Goals (child health, maternal health, global partnership to fight AIDS and other diseases). How so? Does it not need an MS platform to run?

“When we say the solution adapts to the infrastructure, this means the system, especially the mobile module, works with or without an internet connection in the treatment location. In addition, the cellular module functions on phones that cost one euro here in Europe and don’t require an advanced data plan; the desktop machines do not have to be very powerful.”

You consider Health Tag a real business innovation. Is it a solution designed for the market, to be commercialized? Who would buy it?

“Since the beginning, we designed this solution with its use by NGOs and governments in mind. Beyond this, we see the real possibility of marketing it to clinics and hospitals, particularly those that could use limited versions of the system, with sales of those versions helping to finance the NGOs, social programs or volunteer programs. We demonstrated our prototype for doctors, researchers and NGOs in Brazil and abroad, and these “stakeholders” gave us very positive feedback on the concepts we brought and how we address the problem. They said that our solution has potential for huge impact in the short and long term, and would be very useful in scenarios in which they’ve had experience.”

In future post we’ll talk about KnoWorld, a Virtual Dreams project that was entered in the Mashup category at Imagine World.

See more about Imagine Cup on Startupi.