MobileActive.org

This report takes a journalistic rather than an academic approach. It aims to pique interest, provoke debate, and explore the ideas that emerged from a groundbreaking relationship. It also hopes both to accentuate the Technology Partnership’s many positive results while providing a sense of self-reflection that might benefit other potential partnerships.
Over half a decade of experimentation, the Technology Partnership encountered many challenges and saw a variety of outcomes – some successful, others less so. Some of those outcomes might have been improved by different design, but many were also an unavoidable consequence of a complex world of many players and the fast rate of
technological change.

What emerges clearly, however, is a moment of extraordinary and continued opportunity in which both the humanism of the UN and the action-oriented culture of the private sector will be essential. The potential of this cross-sector collaboration is demonstrated by the work of the UN Foundation and Vodafone Foundation. Public-private alliances of this kind require sacrifice and hard work but promise a significant boost to global efforts to improve human wellbeing.

The use of mobile and wireless technologies to support the achievement of health objectives (mHealth) has the potential to transform the face of health service delivery across the globe. A powerful combination of factors is driving this change. These include rapid advances in mobile technologies and applications, a rise in new opportunities for the integration of mobile health into existing eHealth services, and the continued growth in coverage of mobile cellular networks.

According to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), there are now over 5 billion wireless subscribers; over 70% of them reside in low- and middleincome countries. The GSM Association reports commercial wireless signals cover over 85% of the world’s population, extending far beyond the reach of the electrical grid.

For the first time the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Global Observatory for eHealth (GOe) has sought to determine the status of mHealth in Member States; its 2009 global survey contained a section specifically devoted to mHealth. Completed by 114 Member States, the survey documented for analysis four aspects of mHealth: adoption of initiatives, types of initiatives, status of evaluation, and barriers to implementation. Fourteen categories of mHealth services were surveyed: health call centres, emergency toll-free telephone services, managing emergencies and disasters, mobile telemedicine, appointment reminders, community mobilization and health promotion, treatment compliance, mobile patient records, information access, patient monitoring, health surveys and data collection, surveillance, health awareness raising, and decision support systems.

The recent increase in natural disasters has a significant impact on the lives and livelihoods of the poor in Asia. The spread of information communication technologies (ICTs) in this region’s rural areas suggests the potential of technologies to enhance recovery efforts. While many ICT initiatives have been implemented to aid disaster management, from providing early warning to immediate relief, there exists a gap in the theoretical understanding of the role of technologies in disaster recovery and rehabilitation.

We propose a conceptual framework for understanding the implementation of ICTs in recovery operations, drawing attention to vulnerability reducing potential of the initiatives. We review theories on ICT use in disaster management, and propose the Extended Technology-Community-Management model focusing on vulnerability assessment for the design and implementation of ICT programs for development in rural areas. We illustrate this model using case studies from ICT deployments in post-disaster Asia, particularly India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and China, and suggest implications for theory and practice.

This analysis focuses on SMS as a means to contact 9-1-1 emergency services, with a goal to provide a view of the capabilities, limitations, threats and vulnerabilities of this means of communications. There are millions of SMS messages sent each day and there is a perception that SMS is reliable; however, SMS was never designed as a reliable means for life-saving critical communications. SMS was designed to be secondary to voice calls and was never designed to provide the full and robust communications citizens have come to expect with voice calls. SMS has significant limitations and shortcomings that do not make SMS suitable for emergency communications, especially under life threatening conditions. In conclusion, there are significant limitations inherent in the design of the current Short Message Services which make it impractical to be used for emergency service. However, the industry is fully aware that it is important to address the requirements for people with disabilities as soon as possible. To that end, it is recommended that techniques which are readily available today, such as silent 9-1-1 calls, along with accelerating research and development into emerging technologies such as TTY Emulation, be undertaken while the next generation systems are being designed.

In the context of the rapid growth of mobile phone penetration in developing countries, mobile telephony is currently considered to be particularly important for development. Yet, until recently, very little systematic evidence was available that shed light on the developmental impacts of mobile telecommunication. The Information and Communication Technology for Development (ICT4D) program of the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Canada, has played a critical role in filling some of the research gaps through its partnerships with several key actors in this area.

The objective of this paper is to evaluate the case of mobile phones as a tool in solving development problems drawing from the evidence of IDRC supported projects. IDRC has supported around 20 projects that cut across several themes such as livelihoods, poverty reduction, health, education, the environment and disasters. The projects will be analyzed by theme in order to provide a thematic overview as well as a comparative analysis of the development role of mobile phones. In exploring the evidence from completed projects as well as the foci of new projects, the paper summarizes and critically assesses the key findings and suggests possible avenues for future research.

Problem Quick detection and response were essential for preventing outbreaks of infectious diseases after the Sichuan earthquake. However, the existing public health communication system in Sichuan province, China, was severely damaged by the earthquake.

Approach The Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention set up a mobile phone emergency reporting system. In total, 495 light-powered mobile phones were delivered to local health-care agencies in earthquake affected areas. All phones were loaded with software designed for inputting and transmitting cases of infectious disease directly to a national database for further analysis.

Local setting The emergency reporting system was set up in 14 counties hit hardest by the earthquake in Sichuan province, China.

Relevant changes One week after delivering mobile phones to earthquake-affected areas, the number of health-care agencies at the township level that had filed reports returned to the normal level. The number of cases reported by using mobile phones accounted for as much as 52.9% of the total cases reported weekly from 19 May to 13 July in those areas.

Lessons learned The mobile phone is a useful communication tool for infectious disease surveillance in areas hit by natural disasters. Nevertheless, plans must be made ahead of time and be included in emergency preparedness programmes.

The  usage  of  mobile  phones  is  abundant  in  our  daily  lives  in  various  aspects from making phone calls or sending text messages to checking e-mails or news updates to planning our activities or managing our budget. This project aims at making use of this wide spread usage of mobiles to help in the  data  collection  process.  It  designs  and  develops  a  web  based  system  called “MobiCollect”  that  is  used  for  creating  forms  or  questionnaires  to  be  later accessed  by  the  data  collectors  using  their  mobile  phone  web  browser  in  order fill in the form with the appropriate data. 
 
Once  the  system  design  and  implementation  is  completed  it  will be  tested  and evaluated to ensure the satisfaction of at least the minimum requirements of the proposed system.

A how-to guide on using and implementing RapidSMS for mobile data collection and communication.

Serious crises and disasters have micro and macro social arrangements that differ
from routine situations, as the field of disaster studies has described over its 100-year history.
With increasingly pervasive information and communications technology (ICT) and a
changing political arena where terrorism is perceived as a major threat, the attention to crisis
is high. Some of these new features of social life have created real change in the sociology of
disaster that we are only beginning to understand. However, much of what might seem to be
new is not; rather ICT makes some behaviors more visible, in particular first response and
altruistic activities. Even so, with each new crisis event, the calls for technological solutions
and policy change come fast and furious, often in absence of empirical research. Our lab is
establishing an area of sociologically informed research and ICT development in the area of
crisis informatics. Here, we report on some of the challenges and findings when conducting
empirical study where the subject of attention is disperse, emergent and increasingly
expanding through on-line arenas. We specifically consider the challenge of studying citizen-
side information generation and dissemination activities during the April 16, 2007 crisis at
Virginia Tech, which we have investigated both on-site and on-lin

vi
Since the December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami,the Asian Disaster Preparedness Center (ADPC)
together with the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) have taken initiatives to study the
current situation of emergency communications in the Asia-Pacific countries and to give
recommendation on national emergency telecommunication and national early warning system
setups.Assessments were conducted in Bangladesh,Maldives and Sri Lanka on these emergency
communication systems. To enhance early warning systems, ADPC, under the Indian Ocean
Early-Warning System programme, also introduced the Tsunami Alert Rapid Notification System
Programme with emphasis on robust ICT systems to disseminate information and warnings from
the national to the community level.

In line with this, the following is an e-Primer brought to you by the United Nations
Development Programme’s Asia-Pacific Development Information Programme (UNDP-APDIP) and
the Asian and Pacific Training Centre for Information and Communication Technology for
Development (APCICT).I am confident that this e-Primer will play an effective role in enhancing
and propagating awareness of various ICT tools and will serve as a guide to policy makers,
disaster management practitioners and media personnel on how best to use ICT tools to
successfully counter the threat of disaster.

The Management of the Emergency Capacity Building Project called for a final evaluation of the Project funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Microsoft Corporation to assess progress towards its stated goal and outcomes “to improve the speed, quality and effectiveness of the humanitarian community in saving lives, improving welfare and protecting the rights of people in emergencies.” The main objective of the evaluation is to review progress towards project objectives and goals, to inform future endeavors, and to learn. The primary users of the Final Evaluation are the Senior Managers at the IWG agencies, the Interagency Working Group Emergency Directors, project donors, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Microsoft Corporation, as well as agency staff working on the project. The evaluation used a mixed methods approach, including interviewing individuals, holding focus group discussions with most agencies, and conducting two field surveys, one to partner organizations and one to field staff. A limitation to the evaluation was less than full access to field perspectives due to time/resource constraints and the practical inability to contact all the key staff and partners, as well as non-IWG contacts involved in the project – there simply were more than time permitted (over 500 persons). However, 93 agency staff, partners and non-IWG agencies and individuals were interviewed or surveyed. Because of the complexity of the project, evaluators were given a greater page limit to address all the points in the Terms of Reference.

Opportunities for participation by members of the public are expanding the information arena of disaster. Social
media supports “backchannel” communications, allowing for wide-scale interaction that can be collectively
resourceful, self-policing, and generative of information that is otherwise hard to obtain. Results from our study of
information practices by members of the public during the October 2007 Southern California Wildfires suggest that
community information resources and other backchannel communications activity enabled by social media are gaining
prominence in the disaster arena, despite concern by officials about the legitimacy of information shared through such
means. We argue that these emergent uses of social media are pre-cursors of broader future changes to the institutional
and organizational arrangements of disaster response.

"When danger arises, the rule in normal situations is for people to help those next to them before they help themselves."

Achieving interoperable communication across governmental agencies and jurisdictions remains a challenge and is
simply taking time to implement. Initiatives to support agency interoperability continue. However, community
responders remain in need of two-way device quick response tactics. SMS text-messaging is one viable
interoperable communication technology that provides a bottom-up approach while offering benefits for everyday
use. This research in progress studies the use of a web-based SMS text-message training application, designed to
simulate two-way SMS text-message exchange. Speech Act Theory and the Theory of Planned Behavior are
leveraged to carefully measure SMS text-message exchange. The overarching crisis scenario takes the role of the
local community responder. Initial qualitative pilot results are presented and discussed, including next steps for this
ongoing research.

Reliable communications can be a matter of life-and-death during an emergency or crisis.
First responder communication system interoperability, coverage, and flexibility are among
the most critical issues evident from events such as the terrorist attacks of September 11
2001, the Indian Ocean Tsunami of 2004, and Hurricane Katrina.
Murray State University and research partners are addressing these issues under grants from
the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Cooperating with government officials and first
responders, the team has prototyped, demonstrated, and operated robust yet affordable
mobile communications systems particularly well suited for field operation in rural
environments and small communities. Work has progressed beyond demonstrations to
deployments with first responders for actual emergencies, and initial sales of the systems.
The developed system is called the Man-portable and Interoperable, Tactical-Operations-
Center (MITOC). MITOC is a suite of mobile communications gear that upon arrival at an
emergency is quickly transfigured into a robust communications infrastructure including
satellite communications, wireless LANs, Internet access, radio interoperability, VoIP, and
other services essential for organizing and executing crisis response.
Work is currently focused on: the integration of rapidly expandable coverage using mesh
network technology that stretches the MITOC wireless bubble right to the site of an
emergency; advanced services and applications; and integration into other emergency
response systems. This paper describes requirements for mobile communications for
emergency management; the current capability of MITOC; initial manufacturing and sales of
the current system; and future research directions.