[dtn-interest] DTN enabled printer or fax machine?

[Jeremiah Scholl <[e-mail]>]

Hello DTN people.  Just now I was looking the presentation slides at the link below, specifically slide 10.  It shows an "sms printer" that is used for printing out results from laboratory tests so they can be returned to a clinic via SMS, instead of requiring the physical transport of paper records.

http://www.teampata.org/downloads/presentations/2011/2%20Shaffiq%20Essajee%20Fast%20tracking%20infants.pdf

The idea is being applied to reduce the time from when tests are taken of infants that might have HIV, to when they can put them on Anti Retroviral Treatment.

It made me wonder if anyone has implemented a "dtn printer" or "dtn fax machine". It could be used as a substitute for paper mail, where SMS is not the best alternative. It could provide several advantages.

For example, some studies that transmit health information to mobile phones run into problems because the phones get stolen.  The printer hardware would not be so useful for general purposes however, like a mobile phone is, so the incentive to steal one would not be as great. Also in situations where you want a paper copy of the information that a DTN network is transmitting, then the usability would be much better than having a general computer-printer combo. This is usually the case in  a healthcare setting since the remote clinics that would use a system like this use paper records and it is quite difficult to get them to change over to completely use electronic records.

Also potentially you could transmit much nicer documents than the SMS version.

So I have two questions....


a)      Has anyone ever implemented a DTN-enabled fax machine or printer?

b)      If not would anyone be interested in creating an open source hardware/software implementation of one? I think that it could be useful in the healthcare domain.

Jeremiah

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Jeremiah Scholl, Ph.D.
Senior Researcher
Health Informatics Centre
Karolinska Institutet
[phone]