The total population of Pakistan at the beginning of the year 2020 is approximately 216M and more than 50% of the population is residing in rural areas which are often difficult to reach due to poor road infrastructure. Besides other basic needs of life, medical facilities are also deficient in these areas. Most of the health budget is used in urban areas and rural areas are neglected. In 2017, only 676 rural health centers were working. The health conditions of women and children are even worse. Non-communicable diseases are estimated to account for 58% of all deaths in Pakistan. According to National Diabetes Survey of Pakistan (2016-17), 14% were overweight, 44% were obese and 46% were hypertensive. 44% of children under the age of 5 were reported to be stunted. Malnutrition status in rural areas reported to be worse as compared to urban areas i.e. stunt growth (46%), wasted children (16%) and underweight children (33%).The proposed project SAFE-Rural-Health provides an Education and Training System to help patient and health workers to understand the effectiveness of the new technologies in three different areas of the country: Rural, semi Urban, and Urban . SAFE-Rural-Health is strategically designed to ensure the improvement of health through efficient and appropriate use of intelligent technologies in Pakistan. The rationale is, Pakistan will gain smart health (eHealth/mHealth/Digital Health) experience in both a particular context, and in a cross pilot setting, to share the smart health best practices with developing and neighbouring countries. The expected long term impact of SAFE-Rural-Health, in target country (Pakistan) are improving health of vulnerable groups like maternity and children and old aged people that helps to have healthier and quality life in the far-flung areas of Pakistan, which are at the least priority of doctors, healthcare workers and service providers to work – due to challenges like poor infrastructure and lack of facilities.

This proposal aims to build capacity in HEIs of the partner countries (of DigiHealth-Asia project) to develop graduate certificate and diploma in digital health that would begin a new transformation in the operation of Asian Healthcare systems. The main objective of this project is to harness the power of ICT in health care through the introduction of the digital health care specialised course that would train and assist the healthcare professional in remote monitoring patients. A part of this project involves research and development of a new autonomous framework for pervasive monitoring of medical vital signs of patients using multiple types of affordable sensors connected through a secure and efficient network. The system would integrate a combination of ICT technologies including machine learning algorithm based on multi-view metric learning to learn to the relative importance of different types of sensors dependent on the location of the user, networking and user-friendly application development for collection and analysis of the collected medical data. The partner HEIs will play a crucial role in the knowledge transfer, training Healthcare staff to use the developed technology. This project aims at designing and implementing the framework, as well as demonstrating the feasibility of an autonomous in-home monitoring system at partner health-care facilities through pilot use cases.The main objectives are:- To build capacity in partner HEIs with an aim to develop expertise that would modernize healthcare systems by using digital technologies for health care in assisted living- To develop an education and training programs aiming to enhance skills of healthcare practitioners in use of digital and ICT based patient monitoring and assistive technologies.- To create a sustainable network of healthcare practitioners, researchers, academic teaching staff, researchers and industry professionals, focusing on the development of digital technologies for health care

Because of globalization, standardization leading to accreditation of academic programs has become an increasingly dominant theme in higher education. In order to achieve it, there are various challenges faced by Asian partner country Higher Education Institutions, which resulted in creating the motivation towards undertaking this project. The partner countries face the challenge of strong competition with international institutions because of the easy and wide access to higher education abroad. The institutions can not delay any further to address it, otherwise they risk the severe issues of comparability of quality of education locally and abroad, and other issues relating to recognition of qualification. Moreover, the increased proportion of students entering university-level education has increased the complexity of higher education systems across the entire partner countries, thereby also giving rise to the need of standardization and accreditation. In spite of huge student population in Asia, unfortunately very few universities from Asia are seen in good positions in global world ranking of universities.