Blood Emergency Nepal: App for a Noble Cause

Necessity of blood is one of the biggest in a medical emergency. It is one of the important and basic need for a patient yet the process of getting blood is very difficult. Almost each one of us has gone through the situation when we try to contact here and there in need of blood in emergencies. There are blood banks available, but they also face huge problems to meet the requirement, since they do not have enough donors.

An average person has 4.7 to 5.5 liters of blood, in which he/she can donate 350 ml of blood in every three months. The body regains the volume within 24 hours of donation and hemoglobin count returns to normal within two weeks. In addition to that donating blood is also good for health.

Despite all these facts 0.37 of blood demands is fulfilled. Blood emergency crisis is one of the most challenging crisis in the medical field, and it can only get better by the involvement of donors.

A group of 5 engineering students showed their interest in solving this problem of blood scarcity and created an android application named Blood Emergency Nepal. It is an android application which basically helps the users to find blood easily during an emergency.

The application allows users to sync their contacts and segregates them into 8 different blood groups making it easy to find people with specific blood groups in their time of need. It helps the user to find the perfect blood match right away from their contact list.

How to use the app

1. Download the application from the app store on your android phone of version 2.3 or higher.

2. Once you open the app, enter your mobile number to login to the app.

3. Complete your registration my editing your profile once you are logged in to the application. You can edit your profile by clicking on the icon in the left of the screen.

4. Now you are ready to use the app. Click on the options from the icon and start adding contacts, hospitals, organizations and blood banks, which will be appropriate to you in an emergency.

5. Once you click on the contact section, you will be directed to a new page. Invite people from your contact to use the application. The registered members of your contact will be displayed on the screen and segregated by their respective blood groups.

6. On clicking the hospital option, you will be directed to a page which contains the list of all hospital. You can select the most appropriate hospital from the list. Similarly, you can add blood banks and organizations in your useful list of their respective pages.

7. You can also view the upcoming blood donation events by clicking on events option.

8. You can view all the hospitals, organizations and blood banks that you selected in useful list by clicking on “My Immediates”. This will help you to contact them faster in an emergency.

This is a very useful and one of the must have app on a smart phone. This app tries to bring everything together that is required to get blood faster in an emergency.

We talked with one of the developers of the application Mr. Paribesh Koirala. Paribesh is an engineering student and a co-founder of White Rabbit Studio Pvt. Ltd.

1. How did you come up with this idea? Since when are you working on this application?

It’s almost a year now since the idea first came to us. We wanted to end the uncertainty in getting the right blood donors. Our group of 5 students worked out the possible solution. And with this app as our first product, we started the company, White Rabbit Studio Pvt. Ltd.

2. How do you collect information about ongoing blood donation events?

We will be working with Red Cross as of now we are talking with them on how to work henceforth.

3. How are you bringing the app to more audience?

We are trying it as a social entrepreneurship and trying to move forward with blood donation programs. As for now we are inviting friends and using word of mouth. We will now be using Facebook ad campaigns and google ad words. We want to take it slow as we want genuine users for the app, we are more into awareness approaches. We are also going to do campaigns in different colleges. We are starting from Sagarmatha Engineering college, Sanepa and then Kantipur Engineering college and hence forth.

Blood Donation is a very noble thing to do. It helps to save lives, lack of blood is one of the crucial problems that can only be solved by our involvement. Thus, in my point of view this application is a very useful application and should be used by more people.