Telemedicine & Medical Training Opportunity for Afghanistan
Over 10 years ago, we started helping orphanages for Afghan children in Afghanistan and Pakistan through a non-profit I founded called CharityHelp International. Then about 4 years ago, we formed a new company called Think Renewables in the US to help generate ongoing financial support for these orphanages. Last year, we formed Afghan eMarketing Services to help implement our projects there. As profits are generated by both of these companies, they will be donated to CharityHelp to support its work, including these orphanages.
Shown here are some examples of low cost knowledge delivery systems now available. Each one contains a large eLibrary and can serve this information to other digital devices that are connected to it by Ethernet or WiFi. The lowest cost one is the Raspberry PI based education hotspot that can fit in the palm of your hand, which we learned about through World Possible. It costs about $100 in the US. An example of a knowledge delivery system that can be both an eLibrary server and a video conferencing device is our Conferencing eStation. It combines more than one source of internet into one and contains a large battery backup in order to provide a more reliable way to communicate, even when power and internet service is ntermittent. To further increase system reliability, they can be paired as shown here and if needed, powered by solar.
Volunteer coaches connected by the Internet have been shown to be very effective in motivating students to learn. Shown here is an example of a retired grandmother in England communicating with some children in India via Skype. Sugata Mitra prese
nted this example at the TED forum where he was awarded one million dollars for his pioneering work and inspiring presentation. He also indicated he found that when volunteers provide encouragement and positive feedback to the children, these children seem to become highly motivated and learn relatively quickly.
In addition, there has been a dramatic decrease in the cost of enduser connectivity. Digital devices such as mobile phones, tablet computers and personal computers have significantly decreased in For example, there are now models of android smart phones and tablet computers available for less than $100. Not only are these devices lower cost, they use substantially less power. This is significant, especially when they are powered with new low cost solar cells. For example, the new low powered computers use less than 1/5 the power as regular desktop computers and solar panels are less than1/3 of the cost of what they cost 5 years ago. Therefore, the cost of the solar cells powering a computer workstation is less than 1/15 of what it would have been 5 years ago.
Along with communication technology, financial transaction technologies have been becoming more available. For example, now these mobile operators have been introducing online banking services and several banks in Afghanistan now offer online banking.
