Vaccination Beads: A Visual and Digital Vaccination Record

Arun Shanbhag of Manipal University in India will use near field communication (NFC) tags to transform traditional bracelets worn by infants in India into portable vaccination records that better track particularly migrant communities to promote full childhood vaccination coverage. Vaccinations are recorded on paper, which are easy to lose and make it difficult for health workers to monitor children in migrant communities. They created beaded bracelets that can store vaccine records on a digital tag, and have developed a mobile application that can read the tag using an Android smartphone. In consultation with local communities, they have also developed a universal color code for the beads to represent the required individual vaccines so that they can be easily monitored by health workers. They will now evaluate their approach in a larger study across five villages to assess its overall performance including the stability of the records over time, data storage capacity, the effect on vaccination coverage, and ease of use.