Redesigning global health: Looking beyond human error

Isaac Holeman co-founded an organization that has transformed the lives of thousands of people in Malawi and more than 20 other countries around the world. His groundbreaking idea was to take a familiar object, as a mobile phone, and repurpose it to overcome resupply difficulties caused by huge distances between health workers and hospitals.

After months of work, the initial results were disappointing. Malawi’s poor electricity infrastructure, airtime purchasing habits and unfamiliar mobile phones had not been taken into account.
This led Isaac to focus more on the users’ daily activities than broad concepts like culture and incorporate them into the design of a paper-thin SIM card health app that would run on the basic mobile phones familiar to the health workers of Malawi.

Through his experience he invites us to look at our technologies in practice so that we can re-imagine them from the perspective of the users and fit them in people’s everyday lives.

(Edited by: Eleni Pnevmatikou)