Appropriate Technology

Our catalog of appropriate technology

Technology is necessary in health care at all levels, in prevention, diagnosis, in treatment and rehabilitation,. In as much health care is an important tool in attainment of better health, the availability of appropriate health related technology is necessary for better health.

Health related technology has developed at a rapid pace in the last few years. But their impact on indices of public health has been minimal. While in urban areas technology has influenced health care significantly, its role and relevance into the processes of disease diagnosis, disease treatment, and disease prevention in the rural areas in both the public and the private sector has been poor. The situation is worse at the level of the health workers at the village level, where these public health problems are most often seen, as they have even poorer or no access to technology. We are now faced with a situation where we have technology that is very advanced but cannot be used by the majority of population, because of its expense, inaccessibility and inappropriateness to the problem being encountered.

At Jan Swasthya Sahyog, we have been working over the last 5-years on developing health related technologies for health care needs of the people with limited resources identified at the field level. We strive to ensure that these technologies be as accurate, if not more, as the prevailing ones and yet be simple, acceptable, and yet cheap and which can be used in the low-resource settings in the rural and community levels. We hope that they can be used by the all levels of health workers especially the most peripheral health workers and would make diagnosis more rational and decrease misuse of drugs. The scope of such appropriate technologies includes aids, skills, and techniques, technologies that could be applied towards the above aims.

Development of Technology

Development of these technologies follows a path of identification of the problem, development of the technology, its validation, and then its application after training of the end-users.

First, the need for a certain technology for disease diagnosis, treatment or prevention is identified. Public health problems for which the existing technology is either expensive or not accessible or too mystified or complicated are identified at the community health program or at the referral centre or in the laboratories of Jan Swasthya Sahyog or by interaction with similar groups. Thereafter, the development of appropriate technology is done using the principles of science. Kits are fabricated for initial laboratory validation under controlled conditions against the gold standard. Once validated, these kits are made available to limited organizations for field validation after training them. If validated, these kits are available for general use.

Our appropriate technology catalog contains the details of some of the instruments, tools and diagnostics kits developed by us. These details are a rather brief, and we would be happy to provide more detailed information, in case you need it. In this list some of the items have successfully completed a few rounds of field trials and some are at the field evaluation stage. In case you have a need for any of the listed technologies/kits, you can place your orders with us. The costs indicated in the brochure are an estimate and the exact cost and the delivery time will be communicated after receiving confirmed orders. However, we can assure you that as JSS works with a non-profit ethos, the rates reflect primarily the production costs/ Also, we conduct training programmes for interested individuals/groups for use of these equipment and tests.