I did quite a bit of traveling in the past week that I am excited to share with you! This post will be about my first trip, which was a research trip to the Northern Cape. If you've seen some of my other posts, you might remember that I am doing work in a rural area in South Africa for my Master's thesis. In case you haven't, here's a quick recap of my project:
My Master's thesis is aimed at developing a virtual clinic for remote, rural, and underserved areas. The virtual clinic will connect doctors from urban, well-resourced areas (such as Cape Town) to areas that have limited access to doctors. I am focusing on a specific location in the Northern Cape province of South Africa to do my testing and development. This site is located about ~7 hour drive from Cape Town, in the town of Carnarvon.
Last week, I traveled back to Carnarvon to do some preliminary testing of my clinic system (see below for my setup at the clinic!). Mainly, I was validating that the clinic would work over the mobile network available in the area. This is one of the many considerations I have had to think about in designing the clinic. Many of us are used to having seamless internet connection wherever we go, but there are many places in rural South Africa which do not have fiber internet access and rely on mobile networks. Even the mobile networks that are available don't always provide stable internet access.
When I visited Carnarvon last year, there was only 3G mobile networks available. On this recent visit, we saw that there is now some availability of 4G. This is an exciting sign, as it means the telecommunication companies are investing in infrastructure to improve their services in Carnarvon. Projects such as mine can help encourage this development, as it provides motivation for why better networks are needed in these areas.
While in Carnarvon, I also got a chance to present my system to some of the nurses who work in the area. I received good feedback that I can use to further develop my system, which was great.
Overall, the trip was a great opportunity to remind myself of the reasons why I'm doing my project. It was great to connect with the healthcare workers there and collect important data for my thesis. To end off, I'll share this cute picture of another 'guest' at our guesthouse - her name is Lady Carnarvon!
