By Sameer Verma, Ph.D.
Professor, Information Systems
San Francisco State University
I love variance, because it shows both contrast and spectrum. Without variance, life would be pretty average.
I live in San Francisco, but I grew up in Hyderabad — a bustling metropolitan city in India. My father was a geophysicist, and we lived on the residential campus of a research institute. We lived in a place with all the amenities of any urban environment. Electricity and water supply were 24/7. Our community had a local clinic with a residential doctor, as well as our own movie theater, tennis courts, post office and bank. In our home, we even had a PDP-11 (a popular minicomputer) as early as the mid-1970s.
By contrast, we would visit my grandparents in a rural part of India about once a year. My maternal grandparents lived there. That side of the family was steeped in farming. It was a fascinating lifestyle to a city kid: kerosene lanterns, bio-gas digestor in the backyard, a Persian wheel for watering the garden and plenty of sugarcane straight from the field. From that young age, I also became very familiar with the deep-seated challenges and hardships faced by communities living with limited access to resources. No electricity, no doctors, no hospitals, water scarcity, and under-resourced schools. That early exposure planted a seed — a profound, long-term commitment to one day help alleviate those struggles and improve lives. Not a handout, but a leg up. For well over three decades, I have pursued this goal by working at the intersection of technology and education.
I met Prof. Gary Selnow when I was interviewing for the job of an assistant professor at San Francisco State University. I remember him distinctly; he was very specific and pointed with his questions, given that a part of my dissertation relied on modes of communication. The good news was that I got the job! We became colleagues and I gained a lifelong mentor and a friend. (We have a common bond in Festivus!) At work, Gary told me about WiRED International, and how students could help refurbish old computers for an ongoing health information project. That was my first project with WiRED. Gary had started WiRED in 1997, but I did not know much about it back then.
Comment
By Gary Selnow, Ph.D.
In his essay, Prof. Sameer Verma describes our first meeting, across a conference table, when he was interviewing for a teaching position at San Francisco State University. Over the years, I had interviewed many candidates for teaching positions, but Sameer stood out. That was in 2000, three years after WiRED began operating in conflict zones and low-resource countries, and I quickly recognized that his interest in using technology to deliver educational programs in challenging environments paralleled my own.
No spoiler here: Sameer got the job, and we became colleagues. As WiRED expanded its global reach, with activities in Iraq, Central and South America and the Peruvian Amazon, Sameer became increasingly interested in applying his technical expertise to our work in remote locations. He joined WiRED’s board and soon put that expertise to practical use. Among his early contributions, he designed a portable, local Wi-Fi system that allowed clinicians working in remote Amazon villages to access electronic medical records stored on a resource boat more than a mile away, all entirely off the grid.
Sameer has continued to contribute his expertise to WiRED over the years and today works closely with our IT team. Technology has become indispensable to our mission, allowing us to bring essential Community Health Worker training and health education to some of the world’s most remote and under-resourced communities. Sameer’s combination of technical ingenuity and commitment to reaching people in difficult circumstances has helped make that work possible.
In parallel, I was working with another concept: rural education, specifically through the One Laptop per Child project. We built systems to provide digital learning resources to school children in remote areas, utilizing solar and battery-powered offline servers and local Wi-Fi networks to bypass the lack of reliable Internet.
Over time, the ideas rubbed off from one project to the other. Eventually, I found an opportunity to transfer this technical knowledge to the global health sector through volunteer work with WiRED.. My time with WiRED taught me that delivery technology is fundamentally agnostic, regardless of the content. The same hardware and network infrastructure used to deliver a second-grade math textbook can be directly pivoted to provide clinicians and community health workers with critical training on sanitation and infectious diseases.
In another instance, I worked on a WiRED project in Kenya, where we built power-resilient databases running on a Raspberry Pi (a tiny computer) so that in case of power brownouts the database would remain intact and would survive multiple power cycles. The effort involved the development of a database constructed around the current patient intake forms, clinician reports and other paperwork that tracked a patient through each station at the clinic. In addition to gathering the information for use in treating patients, the database compiled monthly reports required by local and national health officials. We worked with a team in Kenya. The two groups — in the U.S. and in Kenya — worked collaboratively over 10,000 miles apart, using email and Dropbox to coordinate our work. Eventually, with phone calls through the night and into the early morning hours, we got the system set up . . . and it worked!
With this in mind, I accepted the challenge to create the technology that allows WiRED to offer health information modules to people in regions completely disconnected from the Internet. I built the infrastructure to create a mobile clinic that fit entirely into a single field-ready suitcase. It contained two laptops for clinicians, a server capable of holding medical records and its own local Wi-Fi network, all running seamlessly on battery power.
Seasoned boatmen carried this suitcase up the Amazonas River in Peru to isolated settlements accessible only by water. The laptops set up in temporary village clinics used portable Wi-Fi to connect to a server on the boat, where patient data were stored and made available for collaboration among the medical team. With this instant infrastructure, doctors set up camp, examined local residents, generated prescriptions and provided essential medical services where care had previously been unavailable.
Seeing the solutions I had spent years developing for education successfully adapted to support healthcare workers in the Amazon was a deeply fulfilling experience. Even more remarkable was that everything operated seamlessly beyond the reach of traditional power, phone and internet grids, helping address the health needs of people living deep in the jungles of South America. Making this possible required a dedicated team: my IT solutions, WiRED’s advance team, a rugged boat crew and volunteer doctors who delivered healthcare services under some of the most austere conditions imaginable.
Organizations like WiRED demonstrate the incredible power of collaboration and the necessity of partnership. A lot of the work we do in the technology sector is designed to solve “first world” problems, built on the assumption that we have access to plenty of resources. However, the most impactful innovations often come from rotating our approach: taking designs intended for resource-rich environments and adapting them with creative modifications, such as low-power machines, to serve low-resource areas.
We are simply pivoting solutions to empower these communities, providing them with the resources they need to become an active part of the problem-solving team. When we creatively reapply what we already know to help others, we prove that collaboration is not a lost concept, and that we can work together to build a healthier, more capable world. For that, I am grateful to Gary and WiRED for letting me be a part of that journey. Let’s lift all boats.
Bio — Sameer Verma
Sameer Verma, Ph.D., is a professor of Information Systems at San Francisco State University. He has long applied information technology to address humanitarian challenges, particularly in communities where connectivity and resources are scarce. His work has ranged from One Laptop per Child initiatives around the world to the development of sustainable, offline information systems. As a member of WiRED International’s Board of Directors, Prof. Verma brings this experience to global health, including development of offline electronic medical record systems used in Peru and Kenya. His efforts embody WiRED’s mission of using appropriate, accessible technology to advance health education, strengthen local capacity and build resilience in underserved communities worldwide.
