It’s hard not to get excited about the work being done bringing health care into the digital age. Mobiles have the potential to increase efficiency at nearly every step of health care provision. These efficiencies aren’t hypothesized—waiting to develop given improvements in technology or infrastructure—they’re being realized right now in clinics and health systems around the world.
Imagine two clinics in rural areas, Community Health Workers (CHW) in one are overburdened searching through paper records to identify previous drug treatment regimens, unable to confirm children with diarrhea are receiving oral re-hydration salts, travelling hours carrying blood samples and results back and forth from the nearest hospital where tests can be preformed.
Author: Jordan Hosmer-Henner
Jordan is director of research at TechChange. He graduated from Duke with a dual major in Economics and Public Policy and is now pursuing an MA in International Science and Technology Policy at the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University. His concentration is in the application of emerging technologies to international development applications. He has particular experience in the use of mobile applications for the delivery of public health and medical services.
Jordan believes in the potential of Free/Open Source software to advance peacebuilding and development goals and is most excited about the ease of replicating, scaling and customizing open solutions. He is looking forward to supporting the talented developers who are working to create innovative technological solutions.
We’re going to continue to look at emerging mobile health applications this week. While last time the focus was on promising technologies on the horizon, these projects share an approach that maximizes the impact of what’s already available—in most places that means sending an SMS. The low cost and high penetration of mobiles make them an incredibly powerful platform for promoting health. In these examples, mobiles are used to expand public health education and improve patient monitoring.
The importance of both mobile network and software security continues to grow as more personal and significant information is communicated wirelessly. Two new attacks threaten the security of the GSM standard, an unwanted headache for mApp developers, while two others threaten the Android and Apple families of moblie operating systems.
Today’s Tech@State event produced some great insights into current uses and future applications for mobile money. The presenters did a wonderful job detailing the different models currently being used to engage the billions who are unbanked but have access to a mobile device. Some key take-aways from the day were (1) the need to focus on user inputs, (2) the importance of building a network of physical agents, (3) and possibilities for other services that are enabled once a successful mobile money system is established.
Several of us at TechChange had the privilege of attending a great event MobileActive and the World Bank put on last night that focused on those failures that I’m sure most involved try to forget. FAILFaireDC brought together some real pioneers in the ICT4D space to discuss issues they had dealt with and well-intentioned projects that went wrong. While the fails ranged from election monitoring and e-governance to ICT for education and health, some key concepts kept popping up. Most importantly? Hubris kills.
A technique recently used by Russian spies to communicate with their handlers could be used by dissidents to spread information from within totalitarian regimes. Unlike cryptography which encodes a message with a cypher, steganography hides content in plain sight.
An issue that comes up time and again in the technology for development space is whether to focus on an applications’ reach or the richness of services provided. In the next couple of posts I’m going to be looking at how this debate is playing out in mHealth.
Three days later as if to highlight the challenges that still remain the Seacom fiber optic cable connecting east Africa to India and Europe failed. The disruption brought connection speeds in Tanzania and Kenya to a crawl while Uganda and Rwanda switched back to more expensive satellite connections. Submarine cables are difficult to repair and vulnerable to accident or malfeasance. In 2008 large parts of the Middle East and Asia were left without connections after an anchor severed the FLAG cable in the Mediterranean.
The challenges don’t end once a cable is laid; extending the connection to rural locations is difficult and costly. Copper wire used for low bandwidth lines is frequently stolen with South Africa alone estimated to lose $1 billion dollars because of replacement costs. These examples highlight both the potential and vulnerability of an increasingly sophisticated communications infrastructure.
On July 2nd, the Main One Cable company finished construction on a 4000 mile fiber optic cable linking Nigeria to Western Europe. The new pipe promises 20 times the capacity of sub-Saharan Africa’s entire satellite network. The Main One is one of 10 new cables being laid to Africa which promise to drive down costs and expand access.
Any banking services. While those in the developed world take it for granted, easy access to a bank is a luxury unknown to most. Throw in a devastating earthquake that knocks out a third of the banks and ATMs in the country and you can see why Bill Gates is banking on mobile phones to help expand financial access in Haiti. His foundation recently set up a $10 million fund to provide grants to the first firm to implement a qualifying mobile banking system as well as the first to process five million transactions.