Tag: SMS

A chance phone call from the Clinton Foundation in Mozambique has changed ours and their lives dramatically. It shows the power of creating appropriate and well constructed websites describing a companys services and products.

What was the problem and then the solution:
Delayed test results have often meant that HIV patients in Mozambique have failed to get timely treatment, particularly for preventing Mother to Child transfer (MTCT) of HIV on birth. However, having introduced and developed our new SMS printer technology with the Clinton Foundation and the Mozambique Ministry of Health the need to send tests to far away laboratories has reduced and has dramatically speeded up test results and HIV treatment for Mothers, Mothers-to-be and their newly born. After a successful 2009 pilot Mozambique has nationally rolled out our SMS printer technology and gateway, with Clinton Foundations help. This GSM network based printer and gateway technology transmits the results of mother and infant HIV tests electronically from two central reference laboratories in Maputo and the northern provincial capital, Nampula, to more than 275 health centres across the country. Previously, test samples and results took, on average, three weeks and up to several months to be transported to and from clinics via various means in remote parts of the country.

How did Sequoia and Clinton Foundation meet?
Because of this serious delay in test results the Clinton Foundation in Mozambique looked around for a technology based solution. They ended up contacting us in Reading having seen our website and enquired about using our SMS printer technology for sending health test data over the GSM network to speed up the time taken. After hearing what the program was about and the disastrous pass through rate from Mother to child for HIV we, at Sequoia, could only say yes to help with the program. Two years of concentrated work with the Clinton Foundation on the hardware and the required gateway software produced a successful pilot program. Subsequent research conducted by the Ministry of Health of Mozambique and the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI), after our SMS printer technology and gateway had been installed, showed that the time it took for clinics to receive test results from reference labs had dropped from an average of about three weeks to about three days after the printers were introduced. Research presented by the Ministry of Health and CHAI at the International AIDS Conference 2010 in Vienna, Austria, showed that this, in turn, reduced the time it took to start infants (and /or mothers to be) on antiretroviral (ARV) treatment by about 4 months. This is now part of the national prevention of mother-to-child (PMTCT) HIV transmission service within Mozambique. The number of infants starting treatment also increased by 60 percent.

How the SMS printer technology and gateway works:
Clinics across the country collect dried blood spot samples from infants and / or mothers to be and transport them to the nearest reference lab, where lab technicians conduct the HIV tests. Results are entered into the SMS printer database at the reference lab and then uploaded onto the Sequoia Technology online server (in Reading UK). The Sequoia gateway then uses the local MCEL GSM phone network to transmit results back to the appropriate clinic. Each clinic has a small thermal paper, GPRS enabled printer that receives the patient test data and prints out the HIV test results alongside a patient identification number. With interruptions in electricity and wireless network signal, the system has been designed to ensure 100 of the data is received by the appropriate printer completely intact – if printers are offline, results are safeguarded in an online gateway queue until the printer is available. The Sequoia Technology gateway shows the status of every printer whether on or not and the number of messages sent or in a queue waiting to be printed. The printer’s small size also makes storage easy in space-constrained clinics, which must also ensure that the printer is kept in a secure room to guarantee patient confidentiality.

Greater efficiency The introduction of SMS printers to clinics has not only meant that babies who test HIV-positive can be started on ARVs sooner – a potentially life-saving intervention – but has also reduced the numbers of new mothers who disappear from the clinics PMTCT program during the, previously, long wait times or after having spent time and money on multiple clinic visits to check for results. According to Mozambiques 2010 report to the UN General Assembly Special Session on HIV/AIDS (UNGASS), about 30 percent of babies born to HIV-positive mothers contract the virus, but only about 14 percent of these babies are tested for HIV before the age of 18 months. Without treatment one-third of HIV-positive babies will die in their first year of life, and almost half by the age of two. With our SMS printer technology in place now the clinics are being able to get to and test mothers-to-be ?for HIV and be able to prescribe AVR drugs in enough time to reduce the likelihood of mother to child transfer of HIV. Additionally further testing after childbirth can check the mothers viral load to ensure the right drugs are given when the mother is breastfeeding an additional way of MTCT of HIV. With our technology in place now, throughout Mozambique, the 30-40 or less if the pre and post birth testing and drug application takes place.

Our SMS printer technology and gateway is then a fast and accurate way of transmitting confidential health data to any remote location but crucially can be used for any disease Malaria, TB, HIV in fact anything that needs to be diagnosed in a lab. This technology forms a low cost and serious platform for countries to transmit diagnostic information quickly and accurately. Additionally, the gateway consolidates all information and therefore gives statistical data about disease spread and location and the quality of the health care across a complete country. Sequoia engineers took 2 years to perfect the gateway software with CHAI and MCEL to produce 100 full data quality and with printer / server buffering and handshaking to ensure the quality of data. Extensive testing took place in pilot phase of this project. Any authorized person can log on to the SMS2printer.co.uk website and retrieve the full data and visual map of where each printer is and the stats of how many messages have been sent / received / pending at each location.

Partnership – We continue to develop more capable GPRS enabled printers and are now working with CHAI in Kenya for potentially deploying a similar system in other African countries for the same health diagnostic transmission platform. Our association with the Clinton team in Mozambique continues and has become more of a partnership and further roll outs are planned as a result of the success so far.

SMS or Short Message Service is a revolution in the field of wireless world. The technology of SMS enables two mobile phones to send and receive text messages between each other. Vodafone is the mobiles company to send the first commercial SMS way back in1992 in Europe. At the infant days of short message service system messages could only be send through GSM mobile networks. Later all the telecom networks including the landline networks were included in the circle of SMS service facility.

If you want to know some technical facts about SMS service then you should know that a SMS could consist of 160 characters if the used character-encoding format is of 7-bit. Otherwise a SMS text could only consist of 70 characters if the used character-encoding format is of 16-bit Unicode UCS2. To dodge past the triviality of character limitation The Long Message Service is launched by which people can send a longer message by sending number of SMSs one by one. EMS or Enhanced Message Service is also introduced to add some colors of special effects to the normal SMSs.

Here are some of the facts, which make SMS so successful and popular around the entire globe. First of all you need to reply as soon as you get the SMS. You may read or reply the SMS anytime since it is stored in you mobile inbox. Secondly, you can send SMS to the switched off mobile phones. The receiver will receive the SMS through his handset right after he switches his cell phone on. SMS message also seems not to disturb a person when still he is busy in some work. Another fact is that SMS generally supports Reverse Billing System. Suppose you want to download a ring tone and you have to pay for it. Then you may download the ring tone from any recommended website and the cost of the ring tone is added to your mobile phone bill. And the most important and most accepted advantage of the SMS service is its low cost nature. It seems that the cost of sending an intra-operator SMS is considerably lower than the cost of sending an inter-operator SMS. Again cost rate of sending local SMS is lesser than sending cost of international SMS.

You must know some useful applications of SMS. The first application is person-to-person text message sending, which is already known to you. Mentioning other applications, you can download materials from Internet to your mobile phone using SMS codes. Some alerts and notifications also come to your mobile phone through SMS. SMS is an important tool for business management these days.

There are some cons of SMS too. Since the SMSs are stored in the inbox, any unwanted person could read your sent SMS other than the person to whom you wanted to send the SMS. If the receiver switches on his mobile and the validity period of the SMSs were already expired during the switch off time, the receiver will not be able to get the SMS.

Some online messengers launch the SMS facility too. The popularity of SMS is increasing day by day and will keep increasing despite of those little cons.

The first thing which comes in mind while making international calls is the ‘money’ involved in it. Individuals always complete their calls in a very short period of time due to the expensive cost that made them unsatisfied. This unsatisfactory element has made people frustrated of not making calls for a longer time to their beloved ones because of high price and that is why Internet phone service has been introduced to eliminate all the barriers of long distance communication be it cost or obstacles. Technology has developed VoIP calls all over the world, the user can easily access its services siting at any corner of world including India, Pakistan, Bangladesh etc. This latest revolution in telecommunication world has changed the way the world communicates.

No matter where the user is, he can easily forward the call to any destination as per his wish. For instance, the user can make cheap VoIP calls to Pakistan without affecting their pockets. Now, the users enjoy PC to PC calls or PC to phone calls at low rates in a hassle free manner. This facility allows users to be in touch with relatives and friends who are staying in Pakistan or at any part of the world. The availability of internet has made it possible for people to make calls to Pakistan at any time in a cost effective manner. The user can also send SMS to multiple friends along with making cheap VoIP calls to Pakistan. The best part VoIP calls is that users will never have to bother about bad voice reception. It is one of the trust worthy service of making international calls.

The user can grab distinct cheap calling plans for making international calls, be it for Pakistan or India. There are many calling plans available in the market. The user can select the plan as per his budget. The consumer can enjoy calling plans to Pakistan by paying very less amount of money.

This highly advanced VoIP technology has given lots of benefit to users along with umpteen calling options like caller id, call divert, call conference etc. The users can easily stay connected to close ones without even thinking about the phone bills. The PC phone calls being doable in nature because of huge contribution of technology. In order to make cheap PC to phone calls, the user just need an Internet connection and a phone. The same with mobile calls, the user need a handset along with a broadband connection. The international calling becomes much easier after the introduction of internet phone service. Moreover, VoIP call rates are very reasonable that anyone can easily afford it. So lets join VoIP family to avail the wonderful calling services.