Borboleta: A Mobile Telehealth System

An Open Source Project - Mobile Telehealth Services for all

The Borboleta Project

The Borboleta Project has been completed. Our research in this field is now in the context of the Maritaca Project funded by FINEP and coordinated by Prof. Arlindo Flávio Conceição (UNIFESP) with the participation of the Infomobile startup company. For more information, contact the Maritaca team at UNIFESP or Infomobile.

An Open Source Software System for Health Center Management

One of the factors of greatest impact on quality of life is access to good health services. Despite the fact that Brazil has a well structured public health system (SUS), the country clearly has not been able to dedicate enough financial and human resources to offer agile and efficient services for its 140 million users. In particular, home care initiatives, such as the Family Health and the Homecare Programs have shown to be effective public health tools because they can, at a relatively low cost, significantly improve the health conditions of the targeted population. Still, in their current versions, there are no Information Technology tools to support the work of health care professionals under these programs, forcing health professionals rely on pencil and paper for managing healthcare information.

The goal of the Borboleta Project is to investigate tools and innovative methodologies in IT to support home care programmes in public health, using advanced tools of Mobile Computing to promote the improvement of health services offered to people with low income.

Why "Borboleta"?

The Borboleta (Butterfly) System is an initiative of the FLOSS Competence Center (CCSL) of IME/USP. The incubated projects in CCSL are part of ARCA, the group of interest in free software at IME. The systems created by members of ARCA are named after animals in reference to Noah's Ark. Since Borboleta is a mobile system that "flies" gracefully from home to home bringing attention, health and happiness to the residents, we chose to use the butterfly as the symbol for this system.

Development and Financing

The Borboleta project is developed at the IME/USP Department of Computer Science, with collaboration of the Primary Health Center of Butantã, part of the School of Medicine of the University of São Paulo, and the Department of Medical Informatics of UNIFESP in São Jose dos Campos. The project was financed by FAPESP and Microsoft Research until 2010.

Overview Paper

Borboleta: A Mobile Telehealth System for Primary Homecare. Rafael Correia, Fabio Kon, Rubens Kon. In Proceedings of the 23rd ACM Symposium on Applied Computing. pp. 1343-1347. March 2008.

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