Mobile Solution for Health Care

Md. Haseen Akhtar with a prototype of the mobile health center. (Photograph courtesy Md. Haseen Akhtar)

Health care facilities in rural India are often underdeveloped in terms of health infrastructure. People have to travel long distances to reach health centers. This can lead to delayed treatment and the unchecked spread of communicable diseases.

Md. Haseen Akhtar has developed what may be part of a solution. A Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Design of the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, he has developed a lightweight folding structure to house a mobile primary health center. The stable and easy-to-deploy, tent-like structure is intended for use by small primary health teams visiting remote villages, thereby making it easier to bring basic care to rural inhabitants.

The shelter has been designed for low-resource environments. It is easy to manufacture in simple sewing workshops and is low-cost. Akhtar developed a working, half-scale model of his structure while at the University of California (UC), Berkeley, where he spent the 2023-2024 academic year on a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research Fellowship.

Versatile structure

Akhtar says the structure could play a key role in the expansion of primary health services to rural populations. It would provide a clean, enclosed space where health workers could erect a folding table and some folding chairs. They would typically have with them a mini pharmacy and some basic equipment, like a stethoscope and a portable X-ray machine.

“People travel far from their homes to reach primary health care facilities in the cities,” he says. “My aim is to have people have their first point of care in rural areas.” People in need of more intensive or specialized care could then be sent to larger health facilities.

The shelters are intended to be carried by teams of four health professionals: a doctor, a nurse, a pharmacy technician and a receptionist or helper. They would travel by bicycle or foot to hard-to-reach areas. “Each day they would travel to a village, take 15 minutes to erect the structure, run an outpatient department for four to six hours, and then pack it up and come back to base,” says Akhtar.

The structure could have widespread uses beyond mobile clinics, such as sheltering medical teams during disaster relief and providing public health services during mass gatherings like cultural or religious festivals.

Designing innovation

At UC Berkeley, Akhtar, alongside his Fulbright supervisor Mark Anderson, professor of architecture at the College of Environmental Design, spent his time at the Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation. There he explored the websites of American hiking tent manufacturers to see how they designed their lightweight shelters. He had already drawn inspiration from origami, the traditional Japanese art of paper folding, and spent countless hours folding paper into different shapes. He then fed those shapes into a computer to further test and modify, while he searched for the most lightweight, stable and easy-to-use design he could come up with.

Akhtar was guided by the simple principle that deployment must be very fast, easily learned, just like opening an umbrella, and without the need for a manual.

Through hours of brainstorming with his mentor Anderson, colleague Kirk Mendoza, and experts Cody Glen, Chris Parsell and Chris Myers at UC Berkeley, he learned to use the institute’s industrial sewing machines and constructed numerous small-scale models of different designs. He tested different shapes and even different types of stitching. When Akhtar was finally satisfied that he had the best design, he built a half-scale model and set it up outside on windy, stormy days to test its stability.

The shelter is in the shape of an eight-sided pyramid. At full scale, it will be approximately 10 feet square at its base and 11 feet off the ground at its highest point. It has four doors, each 7 feet high, and they are operated with zippers. The structure is held up by four lightweight, telescoping aluminum tubes and secured to the ground at four corners by strings attached to stakes pushed into the soil. It is covered by a skin of nylon-like material. The entire structure will weigh only about 3 kilograms.

“I cannot imagine having done this if I had not been a Fulbright fellow at UC Berkeley,” says Akhtar. “It gave me the freedom and exposure to the experts and infrastructure I needed.”

Just before leaving for California, he was awarded a BIRAC Biotechnology Ignition Grant of Rs. 50 lakh, which he plans to use to develop full-scale prototypes and make the shelter “market-ready.” He is using the award money to create a private company for that purpose, under the name haseendesign. It will soon start testing prototypes in rural areas.

Akhtar says his structure is sturdier than a typical American hiking tent. Yet, he says, “my work at Jacobs showed that when mass manufactured, it could be made very inexpensively, maybe for around $25 each.” It could also be used modularly by connecting several shelters using Velcro strips on their doors.

“My end goal,” says Akhtar, “is to make something that is used on a massive scale in India and other countries.”

Burton Bollag is a freelance journalist living in Washington, D.C.