Handgrip Strength Applications in Resource Constrained Settings
Open Access
- Author:
- Sutermaster, Staci Leigh
- Area of Honors:
- Biomedical Engineering
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Science
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- Peter J Butler, Thesis Honors Advisor
Khanjan Mehta, Thesis Supervisor
Margaret June Slattery, Faculty Reader - Keywords:
- handgrip strength
diabetes
developing world
non-communicable disease - Abstract:
- Some of the largest global development challenges deal with access to health care. In order to bridge mitigate this issue, some people are turning towards social entrepreneurial ventures such as telemedicine and community health worker-centric ventures to sustainably improve healthcare access in the developing world. Despite the strong financial, logistical and clinical support from non-governmental organizations (NGOs), government ministries, and private actors alike, the vast majority of telemedicine and community health worker-centric projects fail to survive beyond the initial pilot phase and achieve their full potential. This thesis is broken into two sections. In the first section, 35 entrepreneurial telemedicine and mHealth ventures, and 17 reports that analyze their operations and challenges, were reviewed. From this review recurring failure modes, or factors that lead to failure, of such venture pilots were synthesized. Real-world examples of successful and failed ventures are examined for key take-aways and practical strategies for creating successful commercial telemedicine and community health worker-centric businesses. In the second section, these failure modes were extrapolated and applied to various CHW-centric business models to identify the most important FMs for each of eight business models. A better understanding of these failure modes can inform the design of sustainable and scalable telemedicine and CHW-centric ventures that successfully address the growing healthcare disparities in developing countries.