March | 2014 | TechChange | The Institute for Technology and Social Change

The Eck Institute for Global Health at the University of Notre Dame is launching a pilot initiative with TechChange to experiment with blended learning online and offline on the topic of mHealth: Mobiles for Public Health. As part of Notre Dame’s continuing experiments of best practices in online and hybrid learning, this initiative of the Master of Science in Global Health program will be combining an on-campus class on mHealth taught by Professor Joseph Bock with TechChange’s mHealth online course. According to Dr. Bock, “This pilot course is an exciting initiative and we are eager to promote it.”

Notre Dame’s Master of Science in Global Health program is sponsoring 11 students and program directors to join TechChange’s mHealth online course in conjunction with Professor Joseph Bock’s face-to-face offline mHealth class, which aims to equip students with technical knowledge to apply mobile and Information Communications Technology (ICT) for global health challenges. The school will be receiving data on the students’ participation on the course platform from TechChange, which along with their written assignments for the Master of Science in Global Health class, will factor into determining the students’ grades. As the students will be logged in and participating in TechChange’s online learning platform, Professor Joseph Bock will be meeting in person with the students weekly to discuss the content on the TechChange mHealth course and the professor’s assignments.

In partnership with the mHealth Alliance, TechChange has offered this mHealth: Mobiles for International Development online course four times since 2012. The course, which has been mentioned in the New York Times, has welcomed over 450 doctors, nurses, community health workers, and global public health experts who regularly participate in this online course from over 75 countries. Participants have included representatives of organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO), National Institutes of Health (NIH), Medicin Sans Frontieres (MSF) / Doctors Without Borders, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Cleveland Clinic, Global Health Corps, officials from ministries of health of several countries, and many more.

Notre Dame’s MS in Global Health students have been enthusiastic about beginning the mHealth course, which will run March 31 to April 25, 2014 – just before final exams and before the students travel abroad to pursue summer global health field and research projects. Several students plan on tying in their mHealth online learnings into their planned field work after this semester, including Michael Clark, who believes this mHealth course will help focus his current project to track mosquito-borne disease in Belize using a mobile database platform by meeting other global mHealth practitioners in the online class.

“The mHealth course will help focus my efforts in Belize as it teaches best practices learned through collaboration with local partners across the world,” says Michael Clark. “Further, I look forward to the invaluable tips for implementing ICT4D in previously technology-deprived areas, like rural Belize, that the expert lecturers and current global health practitioners will be able to provide.”

Jingmeng Xie plans to build upon her past experience at a Nairobi maternal health clinic (a Ford Family Program) by applying the content she learned in the mHealth classes to explore the roles mobile technology can play in public health. The MS in Global Health students, through the mHealth initiative, are diving deeply into the role that mobile data collection, electronic health records, and Information and Communications Technologies can promote better health for populations even in the most remote areas in the world. Another student, Thomas Ulsby, is preparing for his summer research trip to India where he hopes to learn how electronic reporting of blood glucose levels via mobile phones has impacted treatment plans for type I and type II diabetes.

We’re very excited to welcome these students from the University of Notre Dame and can’t wait to see how they’ll be applying their experience in mHealth to their summer field projects in India, Belize, Kenya, and beyond!

Interested in learning about mHealth this spring as well? Register now for our mHealth: Mobiles for Public Health online course.

By Timo Luege, TC103: Tech Tools and Skills for Emergency Management facilitator

Working in humanitarian aid and disaster relief across several countries, I first joined the TechChange community as a student in the Tech Tools and Skills for Emergency Management online course in January 2012, and will soon be guiding discussions as a facilitator for the next round of the course that begins March 17, 2014. Since TechChange has offered this emergency management course six times since 2011, I’ve enjoyed stepping up my participation from student, to guest speaker, tech simulation demonstrator, to now a facilitator.

In my opinion, disaster management is a field where nobody is really an expert in that different people have varied areas of expertise. A facilitated TechChange course like TC103 is an opportunity to get people of different backgrounds together, which is especially valuable in a field like disaster management, which evolves so quickly and can be tough to keep track of.

Here are five lessons I have learned over the course of seven years of working in disaster response across Haiti, Liberia, Myanmar, Mali, and most recently the Philippines:

During radio programmes like this in the Philippines, disaster responders explained what assistance the survivors could expect in the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan. Listeners submitted questions by SMS and via Facebook. Photo credit: Timo Luege

1. Build relationships early

Emergencies are not the right time for experiments. In the first phase of an emergency, disaster responders easily work 16 hours per day, seven days a week. This is not the right time to introduce new tools, unless they are an immediate time saver. If you are a technology firm, try to build relations with organizations before the next big disaster. Three months after the onset of a disaster can also be a good time to make contact, because at that stage, people have a little time to breathe but the needs are still huge.

Typhoon Haiyan was deadly in two ways: what the wind couldn’t destroy, the storm surge would flatten. Along the coast houses many houses were completely pulverized and cars thrown around like toys. Photo credit: Timo Luege

2. Buy smartphones for your staff

Smartphones are amazing mobile tools that can do everything from taking photos to replacing paper forms to saving GPS information; however, many organizations still shy away from putting them into the hands of their staff. A basic, but functional, unlocked Android smartphone costs less than $80 USD in some of the more disaster prone parts of the world, and will save you many times that amount of money in gained productivity. Just think of all the paperforms you don’t have to manually enter.

Survivors tried to salvage as many building materials as possible, including wood, corrugated iron sheeting and even nails so that they could repair their homes as quickly as possible. Photo credit: Timo Luege

3. Use tools that the affected population is familiar with

Information is critical for disaster affected people and they are eager to hear what is going on – even if it is bad news. Don’t try to impose your technology of choice on the affected people – find out what works for them. In one country it might be SMS, in another Facebook and in a third it will be old fashioned radio broadcasts or a combination of the above. As an organization, when designing your programmes, don’t focus on the tools but on what you want to achieve.

Even concrete houses like this could not withstand the force of the storm surge and were completely annihilated. Typhoon Haiyan damaged or destroyed close to 1.1 million homes. Photo credit: Timo Luege

4. Make sure the tools you use work offline

Even in a country like the Philippines, where the infrastructure is comparatively good, access to the web will be spotty, particularly after a big disaster like the recent Typhoon Haiyan. Apps and browser-based tools that require you to save information online will only frustrate you. Make sure that whatever tool you are planning to use allows you to save information offline and synchronize later.

In Tacloban, a number of large ships were washed ashore by the typhoon. The survivors used the generators on some of these boats to supply them with electricity. Photo credit: Timo Luege

5. Learn Excel

While many new technologies are more sexy and exciting, Excel is the universal language of data during an emergency. Everybody is using it. The more you know about Excel and the better you are able to import data coming from Excel files, the more information you will be able to access, process and analyze and the better your understanding of the situation will be.

Have you worked in emergency management? What are tech tools that you found useful during that disaster?

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Interested in learning more? Enroll now in the Tech Tools & Skills for Emergency Management online course, which runs November 24 – December 19, 2014.

About the TC103 facilitator: Timo Luege

After nearly ten years of working as a journalist (online, print and radio), Timo worked four years as a Senior Communications Officer for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) in Geneva and Haiti. During this time he also launched the IFRC’s social media activities and wrote the IFRC social media staff guidelines. He then worked as Protection Delegate for International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Liberia before starting to work as a consultant. His clients include UN agencies and NGOs. Among other things, he wrote the UNICEF “Social Media in Emergency Guidelines” and contributed to UNOCHA’s “Humanitarianism in the Network Age”. Over the last year, Timo advised UNHCR- and IFRC-led Shelter Clusters in Myanmar, Mali and most recently the Philippines on Communication and Advocacy. He blogs at Social Media for Good.

Last week, the Mobile World Congress 2014 welcomed the most influential mobile carriers across the world that are shaping the future of mobile, especially for populations who are new mobile consumers. Looking back at some of the news coming from the mobile phone industry’s largest annual event, we examine the key takeaways from this year’s MWC that will impact not just emerging markets, but also developing countries.

1. Facebook wants to bring low-cost or free internet access to Asia, Africa, and Latin America. According to the New York Times, “For Facebook, poorer countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America represent the biggest opportunity to reach new customers, though it must figure out how to get people there online at a low cost.”

Facebook’s $19 billion acquisition of WhatsApp is linked to the social media company’s larger Internet.org initiative to partner with tech companies to have more people across the world, especially in developing countries, to be able to access the internet with a smartphone. Facebook has announced that it wants to partner with five more companies across emerging markets in 2014 to continue this Internet.org initiative.

2. Mozilla’s $25 smartphone will make mobile internet access more affordable. The Mozilla Foundation has joined forces with a Chinese chipmaker, Spreadtrum Communications, to introduce a mobile device that will be sold for only $25 later in 2014. By offering this smartphone at a price point significantly lower than other major players in the smartphone market, Mozilla is aiming to cut into the smartphone dominance of Android and Apple iOS, and looking to take smartphone market share in Latin America and Africa.

3. Mobile money is growing rapidly. In a report launched this week at the Mobile World Congress, GSMA announced that mobile money reached 61 million consumers in 2013. According to the report, “At the end of 2013, nine markets, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Gabon, Kenya, Madagascar, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe, already had more mobile money accounts than bank accounts, compared to just four markets last year.” Mobile money is resulting in more financial inclusion across the developing world. Looking for an intro to mobile money? Check out our free self-paced online course on mobile money here.

4. mHealth innovations for developing nations will continue to be mostly SMS-focused in the short-term. Samsung demonstrated it is moving deeper into the mHealth and wearable technology industries with last week’s launches of the Galaxy S5, which can monitor heart rate, and the Gear Fit. As we’ve seen with our earlier post with Text to Change on using mobiles for social change in developing countries, mHealth still has a long way to go in developing countries with simple SMS campaigns. Until these cheaper smartphones become more accessible to more consumers along with reliable internet connectivity as Facebook and Mozilla at MWC 2014 may promise, mHealth in developing countries will continue to focus more on text messaging.

3G Doctor shared this helpful mHealth Guide to the MWC2014. If anyone was able to attend any of these events, please share with us any insights you learned!

Interested in Mobiles for International Development and mHealth? Join our upcoming mHealth online course, which runs March 31 – April 25, 2014.