Tag: mobile

Nick Martin is President and CEO of TechChange and is the Lead Facilitator for the upcoming course: Mobile Phones for International Development. Class starts Sept. 24. Apply Now!

In the last month, I’ve witnessed an exciting shift in how development in Africa has been treated in the media, especially with regards to mobile phones (Including this excellent post by Ken Banks in BBC). For the first time, we’re seeing the perspective shift from how the US needs to intervene to assist the helpless and needy, to a new frame of what lessons the US and the rest of the world can learn from the many innovations in high tech and mobile technology taking place across the African continent.

Just Saturday afternoon, I found myself checking CNN to see the latest headlines and events from around the world. The top story of the hour, “Seven Ways Mobile Phones have Changed Lives in Africa,” could have been written specifically for our upcoming course on Mobile Phones for International Development by referencing case studies such as M-PESA, the popular mobile money transfer program in Kenya and a case study that we look at extensively in a number of our online courses. I was also pleased to see other projects and organizations mentioned like m-Farm, Ushahidi, Mxit and more– all of whom are already pushing boundaries globally.

There were also references to mHealth initiatives directly relevant to our upcoming course with the mHealth alliance on Mobile Phones for Public Health.One of the organizations specifically mentioned is m-Pedigree, which is the result of Bright Simmons (disclosure: a colleague and International Youth Foundation global fellow) and the work he is doing in Ghana to prevent counterfeit pharmaceuticals with mobile phones.

It’s certainly exciting to see our field getting mainstream attention like this. I’m heading to Ethiopia this week with UPEACE to conduct a workshop, but mainly what I’m looking forward to is an opportunity to meet some of these innovators and see what’s happening first-hand. In Africa and elsewhere, it’s exciting to see the frame shift from “What can we teach?” to “What can we learn from each other?” Stay tuned for a post from the field!

Text to Change’s Chief Technology Officer, Marcus Wagenaar, sat down with me yesterday to discuss new projects on the horizon and innovations in the mHealth field.  Text to Change is an international NGO which uses technology for social change, or as Marcus puts it, “not just a tech company.”  Instead, outreach is where Text to Change works. As the knowledge bearers about mHealth systems and needs, they help design, conceptualize, manage and analyze outreach and projects with their implementing partners to address gaps in healthcare systems and information.

I asked Marcus to talk a bit about some of his favorite projects:

m4rh

Mobiles for Reproductive Health (m4rh), in collaboration with FHI, uses SMS and web based software to send targeted messages about reproductive health.  The user gets their first message and is given 1-3 options for response, such as “if you want more information about condoms, text back 001.” They are then inside a tree of responses win which they can navigate back and forth and discover new information.  The project has been running in Kenya and Tanzania for over a year with pilots in Ghana and Rwanda underway. FHI provides the content and updates, Text to Change runs the IT backend in each country, all from Kampala.

m4rh is one of Marcus’ favorites because it’s “inherently scalable, once it’s set up anyone can access it for free by texting the first keyword to get the main menu” and it’s the “perfect example of Text to -Change because it provides people with information to make informed choices about their lives. In situations where information is lacking or inaccurate around sensitive issues of reproductive health, m4rh allows people to access information that can give them more control over their lives.  They still make their own decisions but at least they have all necessary information to make an informed choice.”

As example of its popularity; in May 2012 more than 40 thousand people have accessed the M4RH information service in Kenya alone. The specific information people access in the system is analyzed. Also, SMS surveys amongst users are carried out to enable deeper analysis of behavioral patterns. By combining this information various things can be deduced. Examples are: which contraceptives are popular in which age groups, what are the differences in male and female use of the system, are the choices people make influenced by the system, etc. These research results or not yet in the public domain but have been shared at various mHealth conferences and we hope to be able to share the results with a wider audience in the near future.

Medical Male Circumcision

The Medical Male Circumcision project, in partnership with Jhpiego in Tanzania and potentially Uganda, is a service hat sends information, similar to m4rh, as well as supporting patient recovery.  Individuals in the beneficiary population get messages regarding where they can receive Medical Male Circumcision and why it’s important, such as “Male circumcision can reduce the risk of female-to-male HIV transmission by 60%”.  After surgery, patients receive messages as soon as the surgery is complete regarding what to expect during their recovery. The Medical Male Circumcision project provides a Virtual Nurse who advises patients: “Make sure that you do not have sex for the first two days,” for example, or later on in the recovery “if your urine is discolored, visit the clinic.” The messages are “specific but lighthearted” with quiz questions every week to engage the patients and to assess how much they know about Medical Male Circumcision. Messages are meant to be encouraging and a “positive way to ensure recovery,” reduce stress, and “decrease health costs overall” by addressing concerns before they become serious health issues.

Text to Change monitors how many people they reach with their messages, how often they are reached, and how much it costs to reach a person. Researchers were able to show a statistically significant association between those men who texted in to the toll-free number asking where male circumcision was available and those who actually followed through and got circumcised. This is a good example of providing people with information to help them making informed decisions about their own health.

Data Collection

The data collection project is in the pilot phase with the Center for Disease Control in Tanzania within the mHealth Alliance. The project targets mothers after they have delivered and will speed up data collection about Vertical or Mother-to-Child-Transmission (MTCT) of HIV.  Currently, midwives and nurses fill in registers for mothers and babies to track their data by hand.  The individual patient data is rarely analyzed and often inaccessible to researchers and government representatives so that today there is no reliable number for the transmission rate for MTCT in Tanzania.  This Data Collection tool pilots a new form for tracking MTCT data, where healthcare workers take data from the standard register, write it on a worksheet and then copy it line by line and send it to a central location using SMS.  The data collected will allow the CDC to calculate the transmission rate for the first time in Tanzania and will enable impact evaluation of interventions that aim to lower the number of Mother to Child Transmission of HI, which is part of the Millennium Development Goals.

I also asked Marcus to give a window into exciting innovations in the pipeline:

FormHub              

FormHub is an Open Source initiative by Columbia University.  Text to Change is working with Columbia to develop and use their platform in the field. Text to Change is currently implementing this technology with one of their partners. The partner will conduct a survey in Uganda’s Luwero District, interviewing 1000s of teachers and students in secondary school about physical abuse, sexual abuse, living conditions, and emotional and physical wellbeing of children.  This is the first ever large-scale survey about these sensitive issues performed in Uganda. The partner designs the survey questions, Text to Change enables easy data collection using mobile technology and the formhub platform. Using cheap Android phones, 60 trained Ugandans will carry out the survey using FormHub.

Marcus also wants to use FormHub to automate data gathering in health and medical setting in remote clinics because it’s simple to use for the designer, data collector and data analist and it’s open source.  Many more interesting projects to come!

Vusion

Vusion is a new SMS open source platform development by Text to Change. The backend is based on the Vumi system developed by the Praekelt Foundation.  Marcus sees Vusion as the next big thing in SMS messaging, and here’s why:

  • Vusion is focused on providing a scalable enterprise messaging platform
  • It can connects to multiple telecom companies and aggregators in multiple countries and multiple shortcodes
  • Once Vusion is set up, you won’t need a programmer to design campaigns or access data so it’s easy for non-technical project managers to use without programming skills
  • An API enables access to SMS data from external applications, which enables easy development of for example; advanced real-time data visualizations, website-widgets, twitter integration, etc.
  • Vusion has different access levels and enables organizations to implement and manage multiple SMS programs in parallel from one central platform.

Programmer? You can download Vusion from github and see what the skeleton looks like.

Some of the cost implications of SMS projects are annual dedicated shortcode fees and aggregator costs.  Vusion reduces this by enabling shortcode sharing. Users can use the same shortcode for small projects to share infrastructure and still be in full control over their campagins and projects  This is the approach Text to Change has been pioneering for years but Vusion will make it easier for organizations to be more involved in their own campaigns by having full access to their projects and the associated data.

Vusion was launched with an extensive demo on the 15th of June in Amsterdam. There is no recording of real-live demo but an accompanying presentation is available on slideshare.

Interested in learning about Mobiles for International Development? Check out our upcoming course, mHealth: Mobile Phones for Public Health, starting in November. 

The TechChange course on Mobiles for International Development starts on June 18. Sign up now!

Have you ever been stuck on the mobile version of a website and were unable to go where you wanted just because you were surfing on your smartphone? One solution gaining prominence is called responsive design, which uses proportional measurements and other techniques to display appropriately-sized content on any device from large displays to smartphones. We are pleased to announce that we have launched our new fully-responsive website with the mobile device in mind. Not sure what responsive design is? Try resizing this window wider and narrower and watch what happens, or if you have a smartphone, try loading our site on it.

1. Mobiles matter and your audience uses them

It’s no secret that we’re big fans of mobile tech (re: Blog Posts of ours: Thoughts on Mobile Money for Development, FrontlineSMS and Technological Responsibility, Risk and Rewards of Mobile Technology in Governance Deployment), and mobile internet users are projected to surpass desktop users by 2015. Furthermore, Jon Evans of TechCrunch predicted that in five years most Sub-Saharan Africans will have smartphones and Vodafone recently announced that they will make a high-end low cost smartphone specifically designed for consumers in developing economies. We tweet more than a dozen articles every day on new innovations in mobile tech, from the developing world to higher education. That’s why when we redesigned our website to represent our online identity, we designed it with mobile in mind. This isn’t just on principle; we’ve seen our mobile traffic increase 175% from the same period last year.

2. Because it can save your organization time and money over the long run

There are many ways to approach mobile, and in the end we decided that a responsive design approach made the most sense for our needs. Building a responsive site based off a common codebase limits the hours needed to update code for each mobile platform out there (iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows Phone 7, and more). While tools exist to streamline these processes and create cross-platform mobile apps, like PhoneGap and Appcelerator, this approach seemed overkill for our site. Furthermore, even if you do develop a native app, with the increase of mobile web use,  your site will be much easier to find, navigate, and utilized by web searchers.

We’re obviously not the first organization to do this (and we’re a little embarrassed it took us this long to catch up), but we are huge believers in the potential for responsive design to broaden reach and shorten development times (over the long run) and we are happy to be a resource for others considering a move in this direction.

3. Because it forces you to re-evaluate your priorities

We decided to take a “mobile first” approach to responsive design, which emphasizes designing for the smallest and most constrained canvas and then building upwards. We felt that this would be a good way to sift through the many pages and multitudes of text on our former site and pull out what was absolutely necessary and most relevant to our users. There are many many reasons to go mobile first, but we found that this process helped clarify our mission and focus.

The last point is that we didn’t do it alone. We read forums, checked ideas, circulated betas, and then asked for feedback from tech communities to help us keep building our model. That’s why we’d like to close with asking you, the reader, for your feedback if/when you get a chance to check out our site — either on a mobile device or otherwise. Also feel free to ask us any questions by emailing info@techchange.org!

After all, any technology is only as powerful as the community that uses it.

After 40 years of rule, Colonel Gaddafi is gone.  Reports say he was killed today in a military offensive in Sirte, Libya after a protracted insurgency that was backed by NATO forces.  While there is room for a conversation about NATO’s actions, whether they’re an example of Responsibility to Protect doctrine, and normative questions of supporting violence.  In the immediate though, history tells us that the more effectively we can help Libya achieve a stable political and economic situation, the more likely we are to see a stable peace.  This is an area where emerging mobile technology and crisis mapping could prove valuable to the development and peacebuilding communities.

 

There is already an example of Ushahidi’s mapping platform being used to track the violence and gather data for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).  The launch of this map was managed by OCHA with volunteers from the Standby Volunteer Task Force.  As Patrick Meier explained at iRevolution, this deployment was called for by OCHA with a predefined set of data management processes and a fully trained team of mappers.  In this example we see the humanitarian community grasping the value of mapping technology and supporting the systems to make it viable in what was an evolving conflict situation when the map launched in March 2011.  You can see the public map here.

 

Having seen a proof of concept for crowdsourcing in the form of the Ushahidi map, Libya in the post-rebellion stage could be a case study for how mobile technology might be leveraged going forward to develop participatory government, rebuild an economy, and provide the citizenry with decentralized access to information.  The high level of mobile penetration means that crowdsourcing tools such as FrontlineSMS could be valuable for gathering and disseminating information about access to health care and justice, as well as supporting participation in governance functions at the local and national levels.

 

A large part of a successful transition will hinge on the desire of Libyans to develop a system of governance that is right for them with the support of the international community, and mobile telephony is only part of the equation.  SMS crowdsourcing and tools such as FrontlineSMS could provide a great deal of value in the transitional process as stability returns to Libya.  I’d like to invite everyone to comment and start a discussion about where we see technology fitting into Libya’s development going forward.

 

 Charles Martin-Shields is TechChange’s Director of Special Projects and Simulation Design.  He  is also a doctoral student at the School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason  University, where his research focuses on conflict management, technology and analytic  methodology.  He can be reached at charles@techchange.org and you can follow him on Twitter  @cmartinshields.

Remember to toast the birth of the World Wide Web this Saturday—just don’t buy it a drink. It was only twenty years ago that Tim Berners-Lee loaded the first webpage. Now it’s such an indispensable aid to modern life that researchers are evaluating not if, but how it’s rewiring our brains. That is of course if you are one of the lucky third of the population that has access. The pace of adoption, however, must make one feel optimistic that soon children won’t remember a world where it hasn’t been possible to ‘ask the internet’ from a mobile.

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