MobileActive's Blog

Below are some awards and funding opportunities that we have come across that might be of interest to the MobileActive community. None of the opportunities listed are adinistered by MobileActive; we are just the messenger!

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In our series of interviews from the Bellagio conference on mobile health, here is David Sasaki's last interview with Patricia Mechael who is coordinating the mobile strategy for the Millennium Village Project. She talks about mobile adoption, user-centric design, women and mobiles, how Millennium Villages is using mobiles to improve health outcomes, and what she sees as the next big projects in mobile health.

David Oso:  You have worked in a number of countries -- Egypt, Sudan, the UK, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Mozambique, Russia, Rwanda, the list keeps going on and on. How are cell phones used differently in these different countries where you've worked?

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Krishnan Ganapathy, a practicing neurosurgeon, is the former president of the Neurological Society of India and current president of the Apollo Telemedicine Networking Foundation. He is also the co-founder of the Telemedicine Society of India, a member of the National Task Force on Telemedicine and an adjunct professor at IIT Madras and at Anna University. He is currently involved in preliminary studies on the clinical evaluation of patients based in rural areas of India, Bhutan, and Bangladesh using wireless telephony. Along with his colleague Aditi Ravindra, Dr. Ganapathy is one of the leading thinkers on mobile health in India and around the world.

What follows is an edited, abridged transcribe from a conversation we had at Rockefeller's Making the eHealth Connection conference. An MP3 of our entire discussion is available for download.

DS: A lot of people don't have an understanding of what mHealth is, what telemedicine is, and how mobile phones are being used by physicians, surgeons, and health care professionals. You've been on the cutting edge of all this for a long time ... can you talk to me about how the way you treat patients has changed over the years with the use of mobile phones?

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In South Africa, mobile phones and HIV/AIDS are two pervsasive realities. Some 75% percent of  children and adults in the country have mobile phones, and according to the National HIV Survey, 10.8% of people over two years old are living with HIV. Almost 1,000 AIDS deaths occur every day. Cell-Life, an NGO based in Cape Town, aims to address this growing AIDS epidemic by using mobile phones.

Cell-Life's "Cellphones for HIV" project continues with two new pilot projects.

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Berhane Gebru is Program Director at AED-SATELLIFE, an international organization which aims to strengthen health care in resource-poor countries by providing disease surveillance solutions and health information distribution to rural healthcare workers using mobile technology. He took some time out from this week's meeting on mHealth and Mobile Telemedicine to describe SATELLIFE's current project in Uganda which equips rural health workers with PDA's and GPRS wireless access points in order to transmit their health data collection to the ministry of health. We also discuss an upcoming project, currently being field-tested, which would allow those same health care workers to make their disease surveillance reports using simple mobile phones.[Editor's note:  A full case study of AED Satellife's project is written up in our recent report "Wireless Technology for Social Change," commissioned by the UNF/Vodafone Group Foundation Technology Partnership]

At the bottom of the post you can download an audio recording of our entire 20-minute conversation. This is an edited and abridged transcription.

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Mobile banking has been touted as such a wild success story for one simple reason: mobile phones have penetrated the market in rural areas of developing countries in the last five years more successfully than traditional banks have been able to over the past 100 years. You can travel to any remote village just about anywhere in Sub-Saharan Africa and it is rare that you will find a bank; far rarer that you will find an ATM. (I remember waiting three and a half hours to use an ATM once in Namibia.) But you are guaranteed to hear ringtones.

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For the last year there has been quite a bit of talk about mobile phone reporting in Africa. For good reason too, since this lowers the technology barrier to getting stories out of hard-to-reach places. Imagine, all you need to do is find a journalist and equip them with an adequate mobile phone Now you can record interviews in video and audio, take pictures and upload in almost any part of the continent.

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A few weeks ago, audience members at a New York Philharmonic concert in New York City's Central Park voted for the encore. Given two options -- Jimi Hendrix's "Purple Haze" and Rimsky-Korsakov's "Flight of the Bumblebee," the audience members texted in their votes. About 74% of respondents voted for Hendrix, so that piece concluded the concert.

Vince Ford, the Philharmonic's Director of New Media, told MobileActive a bit about the orchestra's first steps into mobile marketing. "We have offered ringtones on our website for two years now, but beyond that we haven't done much with mobile," Ford said.

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Mobile phone use is booming. There are close to 3.5 billion mobile phones in use, and mobile penetration rates are increasing quickly, especially in developing countries. This rise of mobile phone use by low-income and so-called 'base-of-the-pyramid' users raises a number of questions. Are low-income people using mobile technology in different ways than their higher-income counterparts? How can mobile phones be desiged and used in ways that are useful to these populations? Two new studies--one of favelas in Brazil and the other of a low-income township in South Africa--seek to answer these questions.

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By Bruce Girard, reposted with permission.

At first glance SMS text messages would seem like a natural for inclusion in a community radio station’s essential toolkit. SMS messages are inexpensive and easy-to-use and in recent years the mobile phones that are needed for sending and receiving them have become ubiquitous. However, an informal survey of recent projects indicates that use of SMS messages among community media in the developing world is still at an early stage. In most stations SMS use is informal. The few cases identified of community stations making more complex use of SMS messages have accompanied political crises or natural disasters and have inevitably been donor financed. There are few, if any, experiences of complex uses of SMS by community media without external funding and technical support, even though the financial and technical resources required are minimal.

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