NEW DELHI, INDIA: Ashoka and the Lemelson Foundation recognized and showcased on Tuesday the application developed by Hilmi Quraishi, fellow at the foundation and co-founder and chief learning technologist at ZMQ as part of its Tech4Society initiative.

Quraishi has developed mobile games on various health challenges that people in developing countries are facing as part of his social entrepreneurship.

“Our idea is to contribute to the need of the society first and then later on develop an ecosystem around it. This time we have introduced TB Cricket game on mobile phone that enables an user to know about tuberculosis and its treatment while playing the game. We have tried to make learning interesting,” said Quraishi.

This TB Cricket game comes along with built-in feature to train health care volunteers and connect various Directly Observed Therapy (DOT) centers to monitor tuberculosis patients.

Quarishi has started pilot project with three private DOT centers in Badarpur and Vijay Vihar in the outskirts of Delhi.

“There are 600 DOT centers in Delhi. We are waiting Delhi Government’s permission to include all these 600 centers in our pilot project,” added Quraishi.

Quraishi has earlier developed game on AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) in four languages namely English, Hindi, Marathi and Kannada. He claims that these games were available on 27 million and there were 10.3 million recorded session of these games.

“Along with that we found that this game was a hit in B and C class cities like Saharanpur, Gorakhpur, Sholapur. Out of total recorded sessions 65 per cent session were played in B and C class cities,” said Quraishi.

QMZ has plans to develop a complete health management solution along with gaming applications.

“In the coming days we will provide people with health guide application on mobile phone. This guide will automatically provide alert on various measures that are required for treatment of disease or health challenge. Like a pregnant woman will get alert on mobile for taking medicine in-time, direction meals to be taken at that time and day on which she should go for health check-up,” said Quraishi.

QMZ develops commercial games along with these social games. The company claims to invests 20 per cent of its profit in social applications which it provides free of cost.

“We don’t charge anything. It is only the operator who may charge for application download. Average shelf life of an application is three months. After three months the user will have to update the application. Even that update is free from our side,” clarified Quraishi.

The company has developed all its social application in four languages namely Hindi, English, Marathi and Kannada and is in the process to come up with Tamil and Bangla version of the applications as well. These games are compatible with Brew, Windows, Symbian, Java and Android platform.

©CyberMedia News