One non-profit helps aid workers improve care to thousands of Haitian earthquake victims, by helping them improve their language skills on their iPhones.

PORT AU PRINCE – When a massive earthquake strikes Haiti, one of your first instincts might not be to mobilize a team of iPhone app developers. But that’s exactly what Burn Advocates Network (BAN), a New Jersey-based non-profit focused on rehabilitating and reintegrating domestic and overseas burn survivors, has done. By partnering with mobile learning pioneer Brainscape to release a free French Creole for Aid Workers app on iTunes, BAN is dramatically improving the speed, quality, and efficiency of medical relief programs by facilitating improved communication between victims and caregivers, local staff and our volunteers.

“Language barriers can be one of the biggest barriers to the effective delivery of medical relief in foreign cultures,” says Samuel L. Davis, founder and executive director of BAN. “Imagine trying to explain to a native clinic that you need a ‘bandage’, or telling a burn victim to wear that bandage for one ‘week’, using just improvised sign language! I realized that having an efficient way to teach our volunteers such simple Creole words beforehand would greatly speed up the aid process and allow us to reach more victims during our limited time in Haiti.”

Kiki Konner, manager at BAN, contacted Brainscape to develop a “French Creole For Aid Workers” app that BAN’s volunteers could use on their iPhones or iPod Touches before or during their trips to Haiti. Brainscape’s fast-growing web & mobile “intelligent flashcards” platform uses a pattern of repetition that is scientifically optimized for maximum learning efficiency, which was perfect for quick French Creole crash courses. Konner and Davis hope to soon co-develop free Brainscape apps for Arabic and Hebrew crash courses for BAN’s multi-cultural Camp SABABA, the first camp in the Middle East for pediatric burn survivors as well as for other communication-intensive foreign aid situations.

Anyone interested in the work of Burn Advocates Network or Brainscape can find them using the information below:

Burn Advocates Network Ltd.
www.burnadvocates.org
Sam Davis, Founder & Exec. Director
sam@burnadvocates.org
(877) BURN-411

Brainscape
www.brain-scape.com
Andrew Cohen, Founder & CEO
acohen@brain-scape.com
(706) 254-6115

image via the Washington Post