Services

The KasaDaka is a voice-based ICT tool that enables knowledge sharing in rural development contexts. The hardware tool runs contextual relevant applications that meet the information needs of the rural poor. The services that have yet been developed are prototypes and will be improved and evaluated in the near future.

• Digivet
• Student services
• RadioMarche clone

DigiVet

DigiVet is part of the Bachelor Thesis of Gossa Lo, a third year Lifestyle Informatics student at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. The idea emerged after a case study by Myrthe van der Wekken and Gossa Lo in Upper East, Ghana in March 2015. During this case study, semi-structured interviews were conducted with subsistence farmers living in Zanlerigu village, Upper-East Ghana. The local information needs emerged when the farmers talked about their lives and livelihoods. One of the information needs pointed out by the farmers is the need to acquire information about animal diseases. Veterinarians often are being limited to deliver assistance due to physical distance, reachability of rural communities and a communication gap between veterinarians and subsistence farmers. The absence of expertise on veterinary medicine is causing unnecessary outbreaks and deaths among livestock.

DigiVet is a visual, voice-based digital veterinary service that aims to bridge the knowledge and distance gap, while delivering real-time, reliable information to subsistence farmers in rural development areas. The service is developed on the KasaDaka* in HTML/CSS and JavaScript and is displayed by means of a small touchscreen. The image below shows three example screens of the prototype’s interface. The service is 100% voice-based, meaning that the end user is guided in his/her local languages during the whole process of using it. The farmer first selects the species of the sick animal (screen 1) and is then guided through a set of questions about symptoms(screen 2) in order to make an accurate diagnosis (screen 3). The outcome of the disease is briefly described to the farmer, together with a set of steps to undertake in order to cure the animal if possible. By tapping the image of a veterinarian on the outcome screen, a SMS containing the relevant symptoms and outcome is send to the respective veterinarian. The data that is received by the veterinarian will provide him with an exact overview of the diseases that occur in a region and will prevent outbreaks from happening.

Asterisk was used to send the SMS that contains the relevant data from the Raspberry Pi computer to a mobile phone. The DigiVet prototype is published on GitHub we would to have people contributing in order to improve the service.

*If you would like more information on contributing to DigiVet or developing a similar service, check out the necessary hardware in the Hardware section.

ICT4D students