Building an Open Source Platform for Forensic Medical Documentation of Human Rights Violations

Abstract

MediCapt is a virtual platform for secure documentation of medical records, currently deployed by Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) in Kenya and the Democratic Republic of the Congo to forensically and clinically document sexual violence. Its uses in documenting of sexual violence have allowed for the collection of court-admissible evidence for use in the prosecution of perpetrators, even in areas with limited access to healthcare and low levels of literacy, where perpetrators might otherwise go free due to a lack of registered physical evidence. We have rewritten an early version of MediCapt with the guidance of PHR, with the aim of building the first widely deployable, open-source, in-the-field health data collection platform that focuses on forensic and clinical documentation of sexual violence, and other human rights violations, in remote areas. To this end, we developed a new automated server-side infrastructure and frontend for MediCapt that scales automatically to any foreseeable level of demand, is compliant with the latest security and privacy regulations and best practices, and will require little to no maintenance in the coming years. Locally, we designed a secure caching system for offline functionality that is easy to integrate, modular and secure, which ensures proper functioning of the platform in low connectivity environments where MediCapt will be deployed.