Piecing together the big picture……..Saritha Rai
From traffic management to healthcare, how technology can be turned to public use
From traffic management to healthcare, how technology can be turned to public use
Ashwin Mahesh, climatologist-astronomer and a PhD in atmospheric sciences from the University of Washington in Seattle, last worked in the US as a specialist on Antarctic clouds and their impact on global climate change. When he returned to Bangalore in 2005, there werent any Antarctic clouds to study.
But when Ashwin Mahesh looked around, urban India presented an abundance of challenges. Tackling these complex challenges would be enough to satiate his own social and intellectual motivations. Mahesh founded a technology lab Mapunity to harness information and communication to promote public good.
Urban traffic, law and order, healthcare, public administration large-scale problems are all around us, and some of them can be fixed simply by trying, says Mahesh, a public policy professor at Bangalores IIM and CEO of Mapunity. Mapunity develops affordable innovations to solve problems in the developmental sphere, an area that commercial technology companies have neglected so far.
Many solutions that Mapunity develops and passes on to governments, NGOs and private companies have a public face. For instance, its traffic information system or healthcare system is built to be useful to the government but ultimately delivers value to the public.
One of Mapunitys successful solutions is an urban transport information system aimed at managing the transport requirements of large cities. The problem of traffic congestion can be solved by meshing together the big picture, the premise on which Mapunity works. If you look at the traffic problem with a degree of visualisation, the cause and effect become obvious, says Mahesh.
The system weaves together several types of inputs: teledensity data from mobile towers, videos from police cameras at traffic junctions, location information from GPS-fitted buses and cabs. The technology provides the collaborative environment, depicting the real-time status on traffic conditions in neighbourhoods.
The mobile phone of a cab driver stuck in a bad traffic jam is sending out signals to his service providers nearest base station. If the signals at a particular tower spike, it means the density of phones is increasing in the neighbourhood, providing an estimation of the congestion.
In Bangalore, traffic policemen manning a centralised traffic monitoring and management system have information pouring in from a network of maps, cameras, teledensity readings and GPS from city buses. Technology adds these and provides a visual of the traffic grid. The centralised office can thus track traffic density at particular junctions, advise on road blockages and accident sites and re-route traffic, deploy traffic police personnel to problem areas, tool around with the frequency of green lights at traffic junctions and so on.
The information can also be passed back to road users cell phones advising them on congested routes.
The same inputs can be useful in emergency management, says Mahesh. For instance, Bangalores GPS-fitted ambulances can be tracked in traffic. We are trying to see if we can make smooth passages for all ambulances by turning traffic lights into green as they approach, says Mahesh. Mapunitys law-and-order solution is a collaborative tool in contrast to the paper-based communication tools that the police force currently uses. To nab a crime suspect, for instance, the solution helps map the suspects movements across different neighbourhoods, allowing police to track his route and report back into the suspects files. The collaborative tool makes the work systematic, says Mahesh.
In healthcare, Mapunitys technology puts together simple solutions to promote public health. Vaccidate, that is currently in pilot use in a hospital chain in Bangalore, is a free online and mobile-based alert service that reminds parents about the vaccination schedules for their children. In another solution currently working in Chennai, government and private hospitals report into the system on what patients are being treated for. Health officials can thus track disease outbreaks early in the cycle.
Mapunity receives grants from foundations, corporate social responsibility funds from corporations and also raises money through selling its research and applications commercially.
Government and public institutions have always lagged behind the private sector in using technology. Mapunity has made a start in undoing this drift. We will keep toying around with challenges in the socio-economic space without worrying about the boundaries eventually they all start connecting to each other, says Mahesh.