Bridging a Medical and Technological Gap

While urban India boasts world-class hospitals, a majority of the 741 million Indians living in villages do not have access to even basic medical facilities. This paradox gave birth to Sameer Sawarkar's Neurosynaptic, which seeks to bridge the gap through telemedicine.

Hailing from a family of rural-reform activists, Sawarkar studied engineering at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore and worked in the Indian high-tech mecca for seven years. He used that training to develop a low-cost telemedicine kit that connects rural patients with urban doctors via the Web. ReMeDi measures four vital signs: temperature, blood pressure, heartbeat and blood oxygenation. Trained operators at Internet kiosks transmit the patients' readings to doctors who make preliminary diagnoses and can issue prescriptions.

There are few trained physicians in remote villages, Sawarkar explains, "so patients have to make long and expensive trips to neighboring towns for medical consultation." As a result, medical debts are the biggest nonproductive source of debt in rural India. After four years in research, ReMeDi serves some 50,000 villagers at four centers in southern India.

The Neurosynaptic team developed its own software and had to ensure that the product would work under India's crazy voltage variations. Using narrow bandwith and video applications readily available on PCs instead of high-end cameras brought costs down to less than $500 a kit — far less than competing machines — and to as little as 50¢ per consultation.

Internet service providers in Bangladesh, Mexico, Tunisia and the Philippines have ordered kits, and Sawarkar hopes to expand in India to 1,500 kiosks catering to 30 million people by 2009.