Browsing by Author "Westerveld, Rudi"

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    MUTI Telehealth
    (2007) Tucker, William David; Vuza, Xolisa; Chetty, Marshini; Blake, Edwin H.; Marsden, Gary; Pearson, Murray; Westerveld, Rudi
    For four years we have been iteratively evolving MUTI, a rural telehealth system, for hospitals and clinics in a remote rural part of the Eastern Cape in South Africa (Chetty, 2005; Chetty et al., 2003, 2004a; Maunder et al., 2006; Vuza, 2006; Vuza & Tucker, 2004). MUTI enables nurses and doctors to use a wireless Internet Protocol-based communication system to conduct patient referrals, request ambulance services, order supplies and generally keep in contact with one another. The primary community-oriented goal was to prevent unnecessary travel by sick patients from the clinic to the hospital, as transportation in these poverty-stricken and geographically dispersed areas is difficult and expensive for the local inhabitants. We hope that the system can enable nurses at the clinic to learn how to treat a wide range of problems locally by consulting with doctors that they normally do not meet or even speak with. We also hope that the system will lessen the workload for doctors at the hospital. As we expected, integrating new technologies into their everyday work lives is not straightforward or easy.
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    Reflection on three years of rural wireless Internet Protocol communication
    (Telkom, 2007) Tucker, William David; Blake, Edwin H.; Marsden, Gary; Pearson, Murray; Westerveld, Rudi
    This paper reports on three years of research and fieldwork with a rural wireless Internet Protocol communication project. We built a long-range WiFi network and custom communication software to support a rural telehealth project in the remote Eastern Cape. We report on our work using cellular networks, devices and applications as reference technologies because our users and beneficiaries are very comfortable with them. Of most concern are the technological and contextual issues affecting take up of the systems we designed. The paper intends to provide a summary analysis of our experience so that others in the field can learn from our successes and mistakes with respect to rural Information and Communication Technology for Development (ICT4D) in a South African context.
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    Untitled
    (John Wiley & Sons, 2015) Tucker, William David; Westerveld, Rudi
    Local access in the context of regions in the global South continues to undergo transformation due to the growing ubiquity of mobile connectivity and the recent appearance of what have been termed “inverse” telecommunication infrastructures, that is, bottom-up, self-organized, user-driven, and decentralized networks (Egyedi, Vrancken, & Ubacht, 2007).The “last mile” traditionally is defined in countries and regions in the global North in a telecommunications context as the physical connection between a subscriber and the nearest telephone exchange.