We embrace the following ideas:
- Democratization of programming – that building computation-based solutions should be accessible to all and not just the programmers.
- The spirit of DIY (do it yourself) and Makers – enable everyone to exercise their creativity, build things, test, and iterate to improve.
- The challenge of building toolkits in a formal way to enable end-users create/compose solutions they need.
We are building a technology platform based on these ideas. Our goal is to enable care-givers (informal, formal), volunteers, researchers, nurse practitioners to develop mobile app solutions for their care-receivers.
Beyond building tools and technology, we are working on solutions to overcome the following four challenges:
- Finding solutions that work – the “solutions space” requires much experimentation.
- Make it affordable across all social-economic classes, accessible everywhere.
- Develop and deliver in a self-sustaining model – grants/foundations can only help so long
- Scale to have a global impact
Addressing these challenges is critical to assuring broadest adoption and global footprint. To find “solutions that work” we propose using the user-driven organic evolution. Basically enable users, researchers, practitioners to develop solutions they find useful. This allows for not only patient to patient customization, but users in different geographical and socio-economic groups around the world could develop distinct solutions for the same problem that work for them. Our choice of mobile computing platform as a delivery vehicle assures an increasing affordability as cost for mobile platforms drop. Global scale-up will be enabled by region-by-region customization of solutions and also region specific focus on what solutions might be useful. Developing a self-sustaining model is certainly a challenge and we are exploring various options. We are particularly inspired by the Aravind Eye Foundation model to allow people to pay what they can but assure that everyone gets the same quality and value irrespective of what they pay (http://nyti.ms/U0BfBC).