Development of m-Sahayak- the Innovative Android based Application for Real-time Assistance in Indian Agriculture and Health Sectors Biswajit Saha, Kowsar Ali, Premankur Basak, Amit Chaudhuri ICT & Services Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Kolkata Kolkata, India e-mails: { biswajit.saha, kowsar.ali, premankur.basak, amit.chaudhuri }@cdac.in Abstract—Mobile or Smart phones (Android based) is becoming an essential device for all types of people irrespective of the age group and literacy (literate or illiterate). In India, mobile technology has unleashed a paradigm shift in the communication medium to reach out to the masses. Crops/plants need regular physical and scientific handling for proper growth. Extension of mobile-phone based any-time, any-where scientific expert advices to the farmers is a possibility in India, i.e., information was available earlier for electronic processing, and now, communication is merged with Information Technology to create ICT impacts as a whole. ICT enabled environment is becoming a day-to-day reality everywhere in India. Tele-health allows health care professionals to diagnose and treat patients in remote locations using ICT. In this paper, the development of a special Android-based application is reported. The application takes care of certain problems in agriculture and health care by concurrently capturing images, audio and video and sending them to a specified server. Agricultural Scientists or doctors can view or listen to this images/video/audio information and provide proper solutions, accordingly. The development was tested satisfactorily. The paper will report on system concepts, design details and results. Keywords-Android; Mobile Application; Remote area; Real- time Assistance; Telehealth I. INTRODUCTION The agriculture sector is changing the socio-economic environments of the population due to liberalization and globalization. About 75% people are living in rural India and still depend on agriculture. About 43% of India’s geographical area is used for agricultural activity. The agriculture continues to play a major role in Indian economy, by contributing 1/6th of the export earnings. Agriculture is crucial to India’s economy, as it provides 20% of GDP and employs 60% of the workforce. However, most of India’s poorest people are subsistence farmers who have little or no access to technology for their proper solution of the damaged crops. Farmers lack knowledge on medicine or procedure to control the plant damages [1]. Every year, significant amounts of agricultural products are lost in India due to some critical diseases and improper maintenance. In remote areas, very often, the farmers do not get any suggestion regarding the correct scientific procedure to be followed for a particular cultivation. For this reason, they produce lesser amounts of crops by incurring more expenditure. Sahayak, in some Indian languages, means ‘Assistant’. Therefore, the application we present has been given a local name, Mobile Sahayak or m-Sahayak. In India, problems are faced by common people in rural areas in the health sector, too. In urban areas, people get better facility in health care. However, the qualified doctors are not always willing to go to serve in remote rural areas. Many patients in remote villages die without proper treatment [11]. The population is increasing day by day, but the number of physicians, doctors, nurses or government hospitals serving rural population is not increasing proportionately. Therefore, the health care needs of rural population are not being addressed properly [12]. In remote areas, there is a dearth of modern healthcare facilities. This situation demands introduction of tele-medicine support in order to provide fast and high quality medical consultancy covering broad areas. The significant increase of capabilities in modern telecommunication and data processing enables advanced tele-service solutions to assist medical treatment at remote locations [9]. As an affordable and accessible means of communication, rural communities are realizing the potential of mobile telephony to create economic opportunities and strengthen social networks. Mobile telephony effectively reduces the "distance" between individuals and expert scientist/doctors, making the sharing of information and knowledge easier and more effective. It is hoped that the development of this Android-based application can be widely implemented in the near future. This will benefit people in rural areas. Even rehabilitation centres, village schools, mobile health care units and industrial units like mines [5] of developing countries may use the application. II. RELATED WORKS In recent days, there has been an attempt to assist the farmer by telephony service but, this service is not 24X7 hours service. Sometimes, the farmers are not able to connect with experts due to communication failures [6]. Another important problem is that in a critical situation, if the farmers are not able to explain or if the disease is a new one, then farmers would not be able to identify the diseases of the crops [1][2][4][9]. Captured images from crop surfaces can provide a better solution where the remote agri-scientist can see instantly the image for disease diagnosis. Similarly, 133 Copyright (c) The Government of India, 2012. Used by permission to IARIA. ISBN: 978-1-61208-236-3 UBICOMM 2012 : The Sixth International Conference on Mobile Ubiquitous Computing, Systems, Services and Technologies