Health care facility-acquired infections (HAIs) hurt hundreds of millions of lives worldwide. 10-16% of of all newborn and maternal deaths (2.7 million newborns and 303,000 women) in 2015 were linked to HAIs. One third (around 1.3 million) of deaths from diarrheal disease are due to the consumption of contaminated water. One of the most effective ways to deal with this issue is chlorination.

Unfortunately, chlorine supply in developing countries is costly, and many hospitals cannot afford the supply they need. According to a survey done by World Health Organization, 28% of health care facilities lack disinfection solution.

PATH and MSR Global Health have created an innovative new device called "SafiStation" that helps low-resource healthcare facilities produce chlorine on-site. The SafiStation addresses these issues by creating a 1% chlorine solution at a low resource cost, requiring only salt, water, and electricity.

Our capstone is to create a dashboard connected to a database for the engineering team that displays the status and metrics of the devices they will deploy for their beta test. This information will be be displayed in the form of graphs and tables so that problems and pain points can be quickly noted and resolved in future updates.

In Autumn 2018, PATH and MSR will be field testing 50 SafiStation devices in Ghana, Uganda, and Zambia. However, they currently don’t have a method of monitoring the SafiStation devices. Our capstone project is to create a dashboard that displays performance metrics for Path and MSR’s engineering teams. It will display the status and metrics of the devices they will deploy for beta testing. This information will be be displayed in the form of graphs and tables so that problems and pain points can be quickly noted and resolved in future updates.

The targeted user for this project will be primarily researchers and engineers at PATH and MSR. They will be making use of the information projected through the dashboard to assess whether or not the SafiStations are performing up to specification -- for instance, measuring the amount of chlorine solution produced, or the number of errors that have occurred. They will take this information to tweak the SafiStation’s hardware and software, to ensure that future rollouts of the station will be as cost-efficient as possible for hospitals that own them. As a result, we will also be assisting hospitals which lack access to chlorine for sanitation and water cleansing, by helping to ensure the stations are as reliable and useful as possible.

• 

  Research

  • Interviewed our intended users, including engineers and project managers who are working on the SafiStation.
  • Researched data visualization and map sites that users enjoyed using, to ensure our users will have good experience using our dashboard.
• 

  Design

  • Used an agile process for our design phase
  • Worked to provide a design that would provide relevant information clearly, creating graphs that would quickly inform our users of the overall state of the SafiStations.
  • Created and revised wireframes while receiving feedback from our users
• 

  Implementation

  • Worked to implement the map page, performance pages, relevant graphs, and the login page.
  • Used cloud services and database management systems to store various data related to the chlorine generators.