Indigenous Health App (IHApp)

We will contribute to the solutions towards eradicating health disparities globally by designing an interactive an Indigenous Health App (IHApp) to provide information in different languages regarding effective drug-free and virtually cost-free remedies to some common epidemics that cost hundreds of billions of dollars yearly without sustainable solutions to the global challenge question posed by MIT Solve: 'How can we use technology to make good health and access to quality care more equitable for all?'.

Although access to quality health is a human right for everyone, it is known that: 'Currently, half the world lacks access to comprehensive health services. Two billion people face financial hardship due to out-of-pocket healthcare costs. Under-resourced communities (including but not limited to women and girls, ethnic minorities, people with disabilities, and older adults) are often disproportionately affected and experience systematically worse health outcomes', as reported in the MIT Solve solutions application form.

IHApp provides a drug-free and therefore cost-free interactive app in ndifferent languages to help make known effective remedies accessible to those who need such information wherever they may be. IHApp will help to improve health outcomes and access for all with technologies that are 'more affordable, scalable, sustainable, and community-focused', as expected by the MIT Solve global challenge on health equity.

IHApp will provide opportunities for the ethical collation of aggregate data on use of indigenous knowledge systems based on informed consent to share experiences with the intervention.

IHApp will increase the capacity and resilience of health systems, including health workers and suppliers but also through increased self-efficacy by patients to deal with some chronic end endemic problems through known effective indigenous knowledge systems with scientific evidence to back them up.

IHApp will help to improve health services to patients facing underdeveloped access to quality care such as the poor, women, racial and ethnic minorities, refugees and migrants, prisoners, aged people, and people living with disabilities. Anyone with a smart phone or access to the internet can download the app and access relevant information.

The information and the app will be made available through creative commons as open source because that is the model for the sharing of indigenous knowledge systems. Our non-profit arm will manage the platform and satisfied users who wish to donate to support the project will be given the opportunity to do so.

The for-profit arm will focus on the corporate wellness market by running workshops for firms to improve the health of employees and employers alike. We will publish a book and market to all who wish to get copies. We will make documentaries and podcasts and blog to disseminate information about the solution. We will report the work in progress in peer-reviewed journals. We will seek more funding to scale up the solution and reach more users if preliminary results are promising as expected.

IHApp is a contribution to Black and Brown Innovation to help close the disparities that affect them more adversely especially during pandemics, disasters, emergencies, climate crisis, poverty, racism, and capitalist commercialization.

Short title: Indigenous Health App (IHApp)
Long title: Indigenous Knowledge Systems and Health Information Technology App
Contact person and their contact information: Dr. Biko Agozino, Sociology, agozino@vt.edu
(mailto:agozino@vt.edu)
Project description: This project will develop an interactive free app that can enable users to search for proven remedies that are drug-free, and make recommendations with a searchable database and a voice option for global accessibility.
Project deliverables: Web site and app, books and peer-reviewed articles, blogs, documentaries, podcasts, workshops.
Expected impact of the project: Global improvement in access to wellness
Required skills of the team engaging in the project: Computer science, social and behavioral sciences, writing, coding, web design, marketing.
URLs to follow for additional information: website and app development: https://health.cs.vt.edu
(https://health.cs.vt.edu) , http://hdl.handle.net/10919/93... (http://hdl.handle.net/10919/93...)
Type of project (digital library, digital preservation activity, video, construction effort in VR/AR, game, web site, database, …): website, database, voice app
Signup information: TBD
List of people interested in this project (please be courteous, and add your name at the end, so we know the order; 
Timeline plans, giving milestones at least twice per month

IHApp will serve everyone but the target is Black and Brown people who tend to be more exposed to health disparities and whose indigenous knowledge systems tend to be discarded by modern medicine even when they prove to be effective. Since our solution will be accewssible to the marginalized, it will be accessible to all.

The PI, Dr. Agozino, was raised in Africa without adequate access to modern healthcare but learned from his healer patients how to prevent ior treat some conditions, leading hiom to make his own discoveries of drug-free approaches based on natural bio-feedback mechanisms that are cost-free. Those who have satisfactorily tried the Africana Drug-Free Agozino Methodology urged him to publish the findings. That led to the book, ADAM: Africana Drug-Free Alternative Medicine. A caller to an online radio live interview suggested that I should stop calling it the alternative because it is more original than modern medicine and I agreed with the caller. With small internal grant in the spring of 2023, the PI was able to hire student research assistants for an intervention project based on indigenous knowledge systems during the Ebola outbreak in East Africa. Prior to that two undergraduate students in computer science volunteered to help build the initial website. We plan to recruit paid compouter science students to work on the developmnent of the app and the website and we plan to collaborate with other colleagues to make our solution sustainable and scalable for the benefit of all.

The PI has been developing this concept for decades and users have been asking him to scale it up to reach more users worldwide. A pilot of the methods on a larger scale will help to test the hypotheses and standardize the approach for wider use.

We need financial support to hire software engineers to help with the development of our platform. We also need technical support from computer scientists to help manage the platform. The legal and cultural barriers relate to intellectual property rights by indigenous peoples but since our approach is based on discoveries by the PI, we do not anticipate legal troubles or cultural appropriation challenges. Our biggest challenge is the market model that relies on free sharing of information in return for voluntary donations by satisfied users. This model will be complemented by the hybrid package of corporate wellness workshops to earn income that will help to keep the intervention sustainable. We will also offer our book for purchase by interested users.

Indigenous knowledge systems are usually discounted when experts discuss the application of ICT to healthcare but health information should be open to contributions from all sources. This NLM proposal departs from tendencies that neglect indigenous knowledge systems relevant to the reduction of health disparities. We plan to fill this gap in information by seeking to build a platform for the metadata analysis of proven effective drug-free indigenous knowledge systems that are applicable to the healthcare crisis facing the world with the objective of delivering sustainable solutions with Indigenous Health App (IHApp) of the self. The ancient and modern African contributions to healthcare and information technologies are too significant to be ignored in any serious attempts to offer effective solutions to existing problems. Our HI Tech solutions will do exactly that by identifying proven solutions and building a searchable database that is made accessible to mobile devices and the internet to allow Africans to improve their self-efficacy as citizen scientists who are able to participate in the discovery of new knowledge, the testing of existing hypotheses, and the dissemination of proven solutions to all that need the knowledge. Self-healing networks have been developed in ICT as simulacra of the self-healing human body. We propose a simulacra of the simulacra by designing interactive platforms that would equip anyone with the technologies of the self to enhance self-efficacy and self-healing through a library archive of indigenous drug-free remedies to be piloted with a sample of volunteers.

Two equivalent groups will be recruited to try the app and the results will be compared for preliminary data to support extramural grants applications. The methodology for developing ‘African-centered automated generation of metadata’ has been described by Abdul Karim Bangura (2012). African capabilities of collecting, analyzing and applying data are on the increase but you will never know it from reading biomedical research reports about Africa that rely almost exclusively on theories developed outside the African context with Africans contributing mainly epidemiological reports that are rarely cited (Chilisa, 2011). Bangura advocates the mining of the huge data about data (or metadata) that are generated in Africa. One area of relevance that he highlighted is the area of bioinformatics or the pluridisciplinary field that combines interests from biology, information technology and social statistics to probe big data for patterns of genetic variations, digital imaging of the body, and simulation of natural environmental interactions. Our approach differs slightly by narrowing the focus to Indigenous Health App (IHApp) and slightly away from genetic analysis and bioinformatics generally to drug-free original, alternative and complementary medicine.

In Artificial Intelligence, self-healing networks are designed to be capable of recognizing viruses and automatically take care of the infections the way that the human body does all the time as demonstrated in the animation series featuring Chris Rock as Osmosis Jones, though Jones acted as an anti-biotic agent in the bloodstream. We propose to abstract the principles of the self-healing networks from artificial intelligence (AI) and apply them to Health Informatics (HI) for the benefit of all but especially for the benefits of poor patients in the US and elsewhere who cannot afford biopharmaceutical products. For instance, American Indian/Alaska Natives are more likely to be obese and to suffer health disparities and comorbidities associated with obesity but Indigenous Health App is being developed by our project to help communities to control weight cost-free. Our project will lead to a proposal to NSF and NIH for a large grant to scale up our solution.

Although computer scientists do not always acknowledge that the model for self-healing networks comes from the life sciences, we see the organismic algorithm as promising in the design of human self-healing ITC platforms (Quattrociocchi, Caldwell and Scala, 2014). We propose to build an interactive platform or searchable database of proven remedies accumulated by indigenous knowledge systems around the world. This database will be accessible through social media and the flow of information will allow for feedback loops that will allow readers to upload their own home remedies for evaluation by the community of e-citizens to continuously grow the available knowledge and dynamically isolate ineffective recommendations while standardizing the effective ones. Mozumder and Marathe (2007) analyzed pooled data from 1960-2004 and found that access to information and communication technologies such as telephone and television ownership correlated with the survival rates from malaria in 70 countries around the world. This was not just because the ICT owners are more likely to be relatively wealthy and therefore more likely to be healthy but because ICT can be useful in public health education towards prevention and homecare in remote locations. Our Indigenous Health App will serve remote communities to promote health.

Two Student volunteers and three paid student research assistants have worked on my project in the past.

Over 30 years

The two student consultants are white, one male and one female; the paid student research assistants are African American, all females.

With donations, grants and investments, we plan to continue our research and development to such an extent that we may in the future go beyond virtual clinics to establish or support actual clinics in deprived communities with emphasis on drug-free or cost-free medicine for those who need relief from chronic conditions that defy cure using biomedical pharmacology alone. The technology and the knowledge already exist but what is missing is a team of pluridisciplinary leaders willing to synthesize and synergize the extant technology and knowledge to solve persistent problems in the health sector. For instance, Africans and many poor people have survived Covid-19 pandemics while many rich Europeans and North Americans perished. Our database will archive some of the drug-free methods that help to reduce health disparities.

Indigenous Knowledge Systems applications in the health sector tend to be exclusively based on herbal therapy, yoga, acupuncture or shamanic incantations and prayers. Indigenous Health App (IHApp)  seeks to radicalize this system by offering drug-free, herb-free and virtually cost-free nutritional and behavioral changes that are already known to be effective for the treatment of some conditions in Africa and around the world. There is a huge opportunity here for investors to come in and support the project at the early stage before we go public, allowing the investors to cash out and exit if desired while allowing us to sustain the project and expand it according to the scale of our resources.

Two undergraduate students from Ed Fox’s class served as unpaid consultants to assist me with setting up a website that could serve as a platform for HI Technologies with indigenous knowledge systems. The ISCE Scholars Program (Whole Health and Global Development) could help to fund a graduate student and/or two undergraduate students in Computer Science to work for 10 hours a week assisting us to develop the platform and start it up our Indigenous Health App, IHApp.

If funding allows, a small honorarium would be paid to the PI and co-PIs for one summer month in 2024. We will consult and collaborate to develop the project and apply for extramural funding to continue the project. We will provide budget updates and present a seminar on the work in progress while submitting to external agencies for more funds to scale up the project.

For instance, Grants.gov has several current calls for grants on obesity management from innovative perspectives and we propose to answer that call with a proposal for drug-free, herb-free, cost-free indigenous knowledge systems backed by scientific evidence.

During the Spring of 2023, ISCE funded Dr. Agozino’s researcher-initiated proposal to hire two research assistants, a graduate and an undergraduate student, to send healing information to communities in Uganda and Sudan during an outbreak of Ebola. Dr. Agozino recently received an invitation to consider applying for a current NIH call for proposals to offer innovative healing in partnership with community-based organizations. The ISCE Scholars Program grant would support the development of such proposals.