An IP based multimodal semi-synchronous rural telehealth service: Adding video messaging and conferencing to MuTI

Abstract

We intend adding video messaging and conferencing to Multimodal Telemedicine Intecommunicator (MuTI), a previous system that has already been in place in the target environment. This is to allow a semi-synchronous communication to occur over the Internet Protocol. Videoconferencing can be used to communicate synchronously and video messaging in a store and forward fashion can be used to communicate asynchronously. MuTI supports store and forward of still images, voicemail and text. The system also supports real time communication by means of audio. The aim of this research is to learn how to bridge the digital divide by building applications that are useful and relevant to the users we build for. We are developing this application together with the users of the application in an iterative fashion where we build the prototypes and show the users at each cycle. The feedback that we get from the users plays an important role in building a prototype for the next cycle. The software will be instrumented to provide statistics about the system usage. We are also going to get data from the users by using questionnaires and compare this data with the statistics about software usage to see how much the system has been used and which features in the system do the users like. We are using a rural South African context in conducting this research. We hope to bring about guidelines and recommendations on how to develop applications to bridge the digital divide in a developing world context.