Please describe your proposed solution.
Current Status: Midwifery & Reproductive Health
According to research by the WHO, 80% of all maternal deaths, stillbirths, and neonatal deaths worldwide could have been averted by the service of a professional midwife.
Yet, midwives are either vastly underrepresented or they are facing other struggles that hinder them to save these lives. Those struggles vary from financial burden to physical and psychological exhaustion, to sexual harassment.
Certified midwives have a similar curriculum to obstetricians and gynecologists yet these traits of a midwife nor their importance in history and presence are widely unknown.
The WHO is on the mission to educate 9,000,000, additional professional midwives, and nurses, by 2030.
COVID-19 has altered or reversed this progress.
Health data collected during pregnancy often get lost or diluted between pregnancy and growing up. Some but not all countries are already addressing this issue.
Midwives find it a lot harder to get proper insurance than other professions.
Statistical data between institutions is currently inconsistent and lags behind.
(Image Source: <https://sdgs.un.org/goals/goal3>)
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Our Approach
<u>The big Goal: Increasing the Reach and Efficiency in Midwifery</u>
We are building a digital platform that seeks to strengthen the reach of midwives and other health personnel to reduce mortality in reproductive health.
We have already begun researching, creating content, and building the team and are currently backing the project with our family business. We hope this Catalyst fund will help us kickstart the launch to become self-sustaining while being able to create new jobs.
We have developed strategies to foster sustainability after a kickstart from Catalyst.
If we have reached sustainability we want to form a foundation for the perpetual cause. At some point, to foster sovereignty, and decentralization we believe it would be the right step to hand operations and governance over to the midwives.
Furthermore, we're planning to instantiate a financial model to leverage spillovers from western midwives to provide free infrastructure for midwives in less developed countries.
We believe that a system in solidarity will be key here.
<u>Information and Communication Hub (This Fund) Web-Version</u>
- The platform enables midwives to connect with women of childbearing age, pregnant women, and new mothers in order to provide education and support around sexual and reproductive health.
- The platform provides a digital maternity log
- Support on a generic and individual level
- The platform provides a space for midwives to share knowledge and resources with each other, as well as connect with other entities in reproductive health.
- We provide information related to midwifery on a daily basis so midwives do not have to search for it.
- We're using the website, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, and potentially TickTock.
<u>Onboarding from offline to Cardano (This fund)</u>
- We have created a child book, a second one is almost finished.
- Both books relate to the outline and are here to create awareness.
- We will sell 5000 books of the print version at a higher price as the second type of funding.
- These books include a key to receive a founder NFT for later Airdrops.
- The online version of the books will be available for free and with audio on the website, so that the less privileged and also the illiterate can benefit from the book, too.
<u>Adding Plutus and App developers for native and dApp (as an outcome of the book sales)</u>
- The funding from the book sales should allow adding developers to our team.
- The funding should allow adding more content creators to our team
- The funding should allow for the ISPO to keep the project sustainable, secure the network and allow to explore and develop the private network to store the health records safely.
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Expected Outcomes (short and long-term)
<u>Challenge Settings are addressed by</u>
- Adding another real-world use case to Cardano
- Adding a new native token to the ecosystem
- Providing NFTs for Airdrop
- Providing NFTs for governance
- Onboarding new users to Cardano with DID and SSI
- Together with Proofspace, we are currently exploring a collaboration to integrate Blockpass
- Potential cross-chain use of e.g. Arweave for 2d/3d-Animations
<u>Midwifery: Improving the current situation by</u>
- Leveraging technology to increase the reach of midwives
- Leveraging technology to increase focus care on crucial cases
- Leveraging technology to rebalance the workload for midwives
- Facilitating the global connection aside from special events
- Democratizing the decision process for midwifery knowledge distribution
- Creating an internationally accepted digital maternity log
- Preserving knowledge free, forever, and decentralized on the blockchain
- If the token rises in value, then midwives could financially benefit from it
<u>Pregnant, mothers, and newborns and their future selves: Improving the situation for</u>
- Unlocking the midwifery service to the financially disadvantaged
- providing base information for medicine (antenatal)
- creating DIDs for mothers and newborns where the administration is weak
- creating a private ledger with pre- and post-birth health records
<u>Governments, Insurances, Healthcare institutions, and Science</u>
- Providing an open API for healthcare and science
- Providing continuously up-to-date and more accurate anonymized data
- Providing data for diseases that could not be addressed, because of broken health records
Please describe how your proposed solution will address the Challenge that you have submitted it in.
Novel and viable applications and products get built on top of Cardano attracting users. Integrations manage to pull in more adoption.
We are in the realms of digital health, governance and decentralized sovereignty.
The first is addressed by the creation of a native token and NFTs on Cardano.
The latter includes decentralized identities (DID) and self-sovereign identities (SSI).
Creation or improvement of different Dapps, products, and integrations that provide value to the Cardano community and wider ecosystem.
- Midwives can potentially KYC mothers and onboard them into DID and / SSI
- We have partnered with NOWPayments to allow payments in Fiat being converted into ADA.
- Integration of Blockpass (partnered with Emurgo) for KYC
- Bridging with Blockfrost
Integrations with other existing services, products, and protocols that improve the end-user experience whether that's giving the user more options or making something easier to use that benefits the wider ecosystem.
- Together with the teams of Atala Prism, Blockpass, and Proofspace, we are currently exploring the feasibility to realize such a flow.
- We will integrate with Lace Wallet as it will be Wallet and Storage for NFTs and DIDs.
What are the main risks that could prevent you from delivering the project successfully and please explain how you will mitigate each risk?
Risk I: Lack of Adoption
<u>Midwives and mothers could refrain from using digital midwifery/ blockchain technology. </u>
DGHWI (German Midwifery Society of Science) has researched, that with COVID-19 the mentality has shifted towards the adoption of digital health. We're working with midwives already to make sure, that UX is seamless.
<u>Book publishing is delayed.</u>
Due to current supply chain issues, the book printing as a funding could take longer than expected.
However, it is not uncommon to have a preorder list with a waiting time.
We will get the delivery date as soon as we order the books, so the delivery time can be properly communicated.
<u>Books won't be bought.</u>
We developed the first book with our own kids and positively tested the books at nurseries.
Risk II: Environment or Technology not ready
<u>Regulatory issues</u>
We are currently crafting the whitepaper to address the concerns of official institutions.
Digital health is generally widely adopted. Our advisors are deeply rooted in the medical environment.
Some countries have already implemented the adaption of blockchain technologies in their agendas.
<u>Decentralized technology won't be ready by the time of app launch.</u>
We can bridge parts centralized as beta. For now, people are used to centralized services, and amongst the target group decentralization is not seen as an urgent key value yet.
When decentralization (F10 = testnet for DID and SSI) is ready we can transfer data that is meant to be on the public or private ledger over to decentralization.