Mhealth on Caktus Group

Caktus Endorses Principles for Digital Development

Wed, 06 Jul 2016 17:58:41 +0000

Caktus is proud to announce that we endorse the Principles for Digital Development or “Digital Principles”, a set of best practices that support technology creation for international development. We feel strongly that they help technology companies like us improve our contributions to the Information and Communications Tool for Development (ICT4D) community. In offering technical design and software development services, we often work alongside our clients to help shape the tools they need. Because of our influence in this process, having established principles are helpful to use as a guide in our conversations and design of the tools we build.

The Journal of Medical Internet Research Features Epic Allies Phase 1 Study Results

Thu, 16 Jun 2016 12:00:00 +0000

The Journal of Medical Internet Research recently published “Epic Allies: Development of a Gaming App to Improve Antiretroviral Therapy Adherence Among Young HIV-Positive Men Who Have Sex With Men”. Epic Allies, initially funded by a federal Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant, represents a partnership between Caktus, UNC’s Institute of Global Health and Infection Diseases, and Duke Global Health Institute.

Epic Allies Featured at mHealth at Duke 2015 Conference

Fri, 19 Jun 2015 12:00:00 +0000

At this year’s mHealth at Duke 2015 Conference, Dr. Lisa Hightow-Weidman discussed her current mHealth projects for HIV prevention. Chief among these projects is her work with Caktus Group on Epic Allies, a mobile gaming app that utilizes social media and mini-games to increase adherence to prescribed medication amongst HIV-positive men who have sex with men (MSM).

Epic Allies Team Members to Speak at Innovate your Cool

Thu, 16 Apr 2015 14:10:43 +0000

The Art of Cool festival is a staple of spring happenings in the Triangle. A three-day festival to present, promote, and preserve jazz and jazz-influenced music, The Art of Cool always promises to be a great time for those interested in music, art, and delicious food from Durham’s many food trucks. But what does music have to do with programming and app development? This year, Caktus Group is helping to sponsor a new portion of the festival called Innovate Your Cool. Innovate Your Cool celebrates the power of cool ideas, advancing innovative thinking by bringing together intelligent people with radically new ideas.

Making a Difference for Teens and Young Adults Living with HIV

Wed, 21 Jan 2015 14:00:33 +0000

Caktus has always pursued projects that make a difference in the world, particularly around HIV/AIDs. Now we’re hoping to provide a technology solution to a population that’s notoriously difficult to treat: teens and young adults living with HIV. They’re disproportionately impacted by new infections and, in the South in particular, those with HIV/AIDs have the lowest survival rates of any group living with the disease.

Improving Infant and Maternal Health in Rwanda and Zambia with RapidSMS

Fri, 19 Sep 2014 21:19:06 +0000

Image courtesy of UNICEF, the funders of this project.

I have had the good fortune of working internationally on mobile health applications due to Caktus’ focus on public health. Our public health work often uses RapidSMS, a free and open-source Django powered framework for dynamic data collection, logistics coordination and communication, leveraging basic short message service (SMS) mobile phone technology. I was able to work on two separate projects tracking data related to the 1000 days between a woman’s pregnancy and the child’s second birthday. Monitoring mothers and children during this time frame is critical as there are many factors that, when monitored properly, can decrease the mortality rates for both mother and child. Both of these projects presented interesting challenges and resulted in a number of takeaways worth further discussion.

Caktus Attends YTH Live

Thu, 17 Apr 2014 12:00:00 +0000

Last week Tobias and I had a great time attending our first Youth+Tech+Health Live conference. I went to present along with our partners Sara LeGrand and Emily Pike from Duke and UNC respectively on our NIH/SBIR funded game focused on encouraging HIV medication adherence. The panel we spoke on “Stick to it: Tech for Medical Adherence + Health Interventions” was rounded out by Dano Beck from the Oregon Health Authority speaking about how they have used SMS message reminders successfully to increase HIV medication adherence in Oregon.

Caktus Presenting HIV mHealth Gamification App for Adherence in San Francisco

Tue, 01 Apr 2014 12:00:00 +0000

We’re pleased to announce that Caktus will be presenting Epic Allies, an mHealth Gamification App to improve ART drug adherence for HIV patients, at this year’s YTH Live in San Francisco.

Caktus Completes RapidSMS Community Coordinator Development for UNICEF

Wed, 05 Feb 2014 14:12:35 +0000

Colin Copeland, Managing Member at Caktus, has wrapped up work, supported by UNICEF, as the Community Coordinator for the open source RapidSMS project. RapidSMS is a text messaging application development library built on top of the Django web framework. It creates a SMS provider agnostic way of sending and receiving text messages. RapidSMS has been used widely in the mobile health field, in particular in areas where internet access cannot be taken for granted and cell phones are the best communication tool available. This has included projects initiated by UNICEF country offices in Ethiopia, Madagascar, Malawi, Rwanda, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

UNC, Duke Team up with Carrboro-based Caktus Group on HIV Gaming App

Wed, 16 Oct 2013 20:46:13 +0000

The following is a press release posted in partnership with our team at UNC and Duke.

The web application development company Caktus Group has teamed up with researchers at the UNC Institute for Global Health & Infectious Diseases and the Duke Global Health Institute to develop a mobile phone app that may help patients better adhere to their medication regimens.

Caktus Teaches mHealth to Fulbright Enrichment Students

Thu, 30 May 2013 15:03:53 +0000

[As part of the Fulbright Enrichment [From Lab to Market]{style=“font-style: italic;”} seminar, Caktus hosted 16 Fulbright students from around the world on Wednesday, May 29th. The participants were engineering and science students with an interest in Public Health and Mobile Health innovation.]{#docs-internal-guid–15dfdd3-f622-293e-da9c-340d4c5b5818}

Caktus sponsoring and speaking on mobile health at SwitchPoint 2013

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 14:13:21 +0000

SwitchPoint is a one-of-a-kind conference and a unique opportunity to learn, share ideas, and hear about global and mobile health efforts around the world. We had a great time at SwitchPoint last year. I’m excited to announce that Caktus, for the second year in a row, is sponsoring [SwitchPoint 2013]{style=“color: rgb(17, 85, 204);”}.

Project Mwana featured in the BBC

Tue, 25 Sep 2012 14:20:13 +0000

Caktus has had the opportunity to work on the infrastructure of RapidSMS, an application framework that allows data collection and logistics coordination using mobile phone text messages for communication. The BBC World News recently posted an article, "RapidSMS: Saving a life in 160 characters" detailing the effects of RapidSMS technology is having on HIV/AIDS treatment in the developing world. The article focuses on work being done to combat the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Malawi where there is one of the highest rates of infection in the world.

Thoughts after attending the UNICEF Rwanda mHealth Conference

Wed, 08 Aug 2012 17:00:00 +0000

This past July, I had the pleasure of attending the UNICEF Rwanda Conference in Kigali, Rwanda. The conferences focus was on developing a comprehensive eHealth suite for numerous nations to implement.

Project Mwana in MobileActive

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 13:52:51 +0000

This past week, Project Mwana was a featured article on the site MobileActive. Project Mwana is a RapidSMS application that connects rural health clinic workers in Zambia and Malawi to HIV testing centers, increasing the collection and turn around time for results to over 50%. Tobias worked with the UNICEF Innovation team on the ground in Zambia and Malawi to assist with the systems architecture and training local developers to maintain the system. The RapidSMS platform allows the application to be easily scalable at a very affordable cost, making it one of the most efficient ways to connect people and send data between people. By the end of 2012, the goal is to have 250 clinics in Malawi using Project Mwana and complete coverage in Zambia by three years.

An alternative RapidSMS router implementation (with Celery!)

Mon, 18 Jul 2011 18:00:00 +0000

We've been using RapidSMS, a Django-powered SMS framework, more and more frequently here at Caktus. It's evolved a lot over the past year-- from being reworked to feel more like a Django app, to merging the rapidsms-core-dev and rapidsms-contrib-apps-dev repositories into a single codebase (no more submodules!), to finally becoming installable via pypi. The "new core" is in a great state now and is much easier to work with. However, one particular aspect of RapidSMS, the route process, has always been complicated and confusing to deal with. Tobias began the conversation on this issue after returning from a 6-week long UNICEF project in Zambia. He summarized the route process like so:

HIV Results, Birth Reminders, and Clinic Communication in Malawi

Wed, 29 Dec 2010 23:52:00 +0000

I recently returned from a 6 week trip in Malawi, where I was heavily involved in the implementation and deployment of Project Mwana, an Information and Communication Technology (ICT) project focused on Maternal and Newborn Child Health (MNCH). The project is currently running as a pilot in both Zambia and Malawi. This post is a fairly technical overview of what the project does and the way in which it was developed.