MOBILE GAME TO TACKLE INFANT MORTALITY IN AFRICA TURNS TO CROWDFUNDING

A team of doctors based in Oxford and Kenya launched a crownfunding campaign to raise 100,000 euro to develop a game to train healthcare workers (HCWs) on saving lives across the African continent.
The scenario-based mobile gaming platform, called Life-saving Instruction for Emergencies(LIFE), will teach HCWs to identify and manage medical emergencies, using game-like training technique to reinforce ways to save the life of a newborn in stress.
Mike Engligh, aprofessor at Oxford’s Department of Tropical Medicine and an Associate Fellow at Green Templeton College, is leading the appeal. English, who is also a paediatrician based in Nairobi, Kenya, said: ‘With face-to-face traning we have reached only a tiny proportion of the 2.5 million African HCWs. We need a system that enables everyone to access and learn the essential steps to save babies in an emergency. This is what we are aiming to do with our LIFE platform. We will make it available so that HCWs with a basic smart phone can download the game and learn or revise essential knowledge regularly.’
The game will teach them the latest guidelines, and can also be linked to professional accreditation, with built-in reminder to stay up-to-date and refresh what has been learned.
Dr. Wilson Were of the World Health Organisation’s Department of maternal, Newborn, Child and Adolescent Health said: ‘The LIFE project is both innovative and informative. It shows the way we should think about and take advantage of the changing technological landscape in Africa.
The team behind the project have launched a 12-month campaign on the Hubbub as the OxReach crowd funding appeal to raise 100,000 euro. The fund will be used to develop an interactive 3D simulation of an emergency scenario based in a hospital.
Over 5000 healthcare workers and 2000 medical students have already been trained using the scenario based tteaching on which the game is based.
The course called ETAT+, is used across Kenya, Uganda, and Rwanda,and introduced to Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, Tanzanai, Sierra Leone, and, most recently, in the war-torn South East Asian nation of Myanmar.