“LIFE”, A New Smartphone App to Train Health Workers to Save Lives
A research group based at KEMRI- Wellcome Trust – Kenya and Oxford
University has developed a free smartphone app for training health workers
called “LIFE” which was launched during the Kenya Paediatric Association
2019 annual conference in Mombasa, Kenya.
The Life-saving Instruction for Emergencies (LIFE) smartphone app uses
interactive 3D simulations of life-threatening emergencies to train
healthcare workers to save lives. The simulations take place in a virtual
3D hospital where users have to find the correct pieces of medical
equipment to manage an emergency and then use this equipment to carry out a
sequence of life-saving steps. At the end of the simulated emergency, if
they have carried out the steps correctly, the LIFE system awards a digital
Continuing Professional Development (CPD) credit that is registered with
the Kenya Paediatric Association (KPA).
There is a desperate need for new methods to train the growing numbers of
healthcare workers around the world, particularly for managing emergencies
in children. In Africa, approximately 1 million children die in their first
month of life and the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that
two-thirds of these children could be saved if the healthcare workers who
look after them had adequate training and resources.
Currently available face-to-face training programmes for healthcare workers
are expensive and are associated with knowledge decay over time requiring
frequent refresher training which only adds to the cost and inconvenience.
To overcome these challenges, LIFE has been designed as a freely available
app that all healthcare workers can download onto their own smartphones.
The LIFE app reminds users on their phones when they need to refresh their
training so that they can quickly test their knowledge to ensure they are
always ready to act in an emergency. The LIFE app issues CPD credits each
time they refresh their knowledge so that healthcare workers are rewarded
with professional recognition for keeping up-to-date.
The development of the LIFE app was initially funded by contributors to a
crowdfunding campaign, including the Skoll Foundation, HTC, and Medicins
Sans Frontieres, with matched funding from the Wellcome Trust. The LIFE
team went on to win funding from the Saving Lives at Birth Grand Challenge
for Development (funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, USAID,
DFID, KOICA and Grand Challenges Canada). In 2018, LIFE won the “VR for
Impact” award from HTC at the World Economic Forum in Davos to develop a
Virtual Reality version of the app.
Healthcare workers around the world can now download the LIFE app for free
from *www.oxlifeproject.org <http://www.oxlifeproject.org>*or the Google
Play Store https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=uk.ac.ox.NDM.LIFE