According to the Scientific Information Service SINC, the objective is to combine research work on the Napo River (Peru) with communications technologies, the sustainability of rural networks and work to improve health services in the area.
Close to 500 kilometers in length, the linear network runs along the length of the Napo river, a tributary to the Amazon, from the city of Iquitos to Cabo Pantoja at the border with Ecuador. It joins rural health establishments in stretches from 20 to 60 kilometers long so that they can stay connected to reference centers.
This was the first of several communications networks which have been developed in isolated areas of Latin America that have been used to test and refine R+D results.
The Napo network allows the evaluation of current developments being implemented by the research group in tele-diagnostics such as the digital tele-stethoscope recently developed by the group in association with Fundatel (Argentina).
This device will allow a remote doctor to listen in real time to sounds made by a patient during an auscultation exam by a health technician in a rural outpost, making it possible to make an immediate diagnosis for some respiratory and cardiac pathologies.
The context for this line of research is the fact that a third of the world’s population lives in rural areas in developing countries which are completely lacking in land-based communications networks. Poor communications have a negative impact on many basic services including health services.
Many of these areas are enormous and health centers tend to be spread far apart, have little access to resources, and are often attended by a single health technician who must face all manner of clinical cases. For this reason it would be extremely useful for them to receive support from reference centers with which they currently have no way of communicating.
The team of researchers led by professors Andrés Martínez and Javier Simó are trying to adapt and optimize wireless communications technologies that can provide telephone and internet networks dozens or hundreds of kilometers in length in order to support low cost telemedicine services which can use these networks to improve the quality of health attention in isolated rural outposts.
