Fellow classmates, students, family, friends, and random visitors, karibu! My name is Amogh, and I'm a first year MSc-GH student at Duke. Just about 24 hours ago, I set off on an odyssey of travel that brought me over 8,000 miles away from home. I'll be here in Kenya for the next ten weeks, and I hope to chronicle my adventures - sharing thoughts, reflections, ramblings, and if my wireless connection permits, pictures - through this very website whenever possible.
Over the next two and a half months, I'll have the opportunity to work on a study focusing on using mobile health (mHealth) technologies to improve maternal and child health. Specifically, I’ll be working with Dr. Eric Green on the Baby Monitor project, a prenatal and postnatal screening system that simulates the interaction between a patient and a nurse through the telephone, rather than a face-to-face interaction. The idea is to extend the reach of health care services to a wider population – one comprised of people who not have the ability or the resources to travel to a health facility and receive pre- or post-natal care in person. We’ll be focusing on pregnant women and mothers living in the rural villages surrounding the city of Eldoret, located in the Rift Valley Region in western Kenya. My research in this area will focus on using this screening system to develop a patient referral system that will allow patients to receive pre- and post-natal screens and to seamlessly schedule and attend health facility visits, based on their screening information. This will undoubtedly be a challenging process, but I can’t begin to tell you how excited I am to finally be able to get started.
We’ll be spending the next few days in the capital city of Nairobi to meet with a few community partners and organizations that Dr. Green and I have previously worked with, including the Population Council and Jacaranda Health. On Sunday, we’ll travel to Eldoret and establish ourselves in what will be our home for the next ten weeks.
Until next time, kwaheri (goodbye)!
