MobileActive's Blog

Although nonprofits in the United States has been slower to embrace mobile phones for health purposes than the rest of the world, mobiles are catching on as a way to reach diverse populations across the U.S.

“Mobile provides a fantastic channel for communication,” said Erin Edgerton, senior social media strategist at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). “It’s always on, always with you and provides personal access to information.”

Nonprofits and government agencies are using this ubiquitous device for health purposes including monitoring, education and instant alerts and communication.

Mobile monitoring

For diabetes patients in Georgia, mobile phones have facilitated an instant connection to help and education.  In several different pilot studies, participants used cell phones to document aspects of diabetes treatment ranging from glucose readings to snapping photos of the meals that they ate. Participants then sent the photos, readings, or other questions to a diabetes education center, where a diabetes educator could instantly respond to questions.

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A key gathering focused on m-learning in Africa took place in Lusaka, Zambia at the end of June. The 3-day leadership summit entitled "Go Mobile! Using Mobile Learning to Teach 21st Century Skills" is one of four events aimed at bringing together stakeholders in education to introduce the idea of m-learning and to demonstrate the possibilities of mobile phones in the classroom.

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RapidResponse is a mHealth platform built on RapidSMS developed for the Millennium Villages Project with support from the UNICEF Innovation Group. RapidResponse uses SMS text messages to facilitate and coordinate the activities of health care providers in the field. These are usually lay community health care workers who tend to provide the majority of patient care in many developing countries.

Using simple text messages, the community health workers are able to register patients and send in health reports to a central web dashboard that allows a health team to closely monitor the health of a community. Powerful messaging features help facilitate communication between the members of the health system and an automated alert system helps reduce gaps in treatment.

This video gives an overview of the platform in a clear and accessible step-by-step manner. While Rapid Response in this case is focused on child malnutrition, Rapid Response has applicability in many other health and non-health settings.

RapidResponse Overview from Matt Berg on Vimeo.

For more information on Rapid Response, see the RapidSMS website.

My post on Google's SMS services raised quite the storm in the waterglass. Erik Hersman took me to taks for, as he sees it, questioning that "if people who are claiming to help the poor should charge, and if so, should they make a profit."

However, this was not my point. My question was why, given the target audience as noted in the Google post and Grameen Foundation press release, for at least one of the services (SMS Tips) the cost per SMS comes at the highest premium price but is not advertised as such in the promotional literature and PR. Secondly, given that Google Labs in India makes a smilar SMS info service available at the regular cost of an SMS in India (which is exceedingly cheap), why does Google behave so differently in the African market, in essence colluding with the absorbitantly high costs of SMS there?

So I emailed Rachel Payne, Google’s lead in Uganda to clarify the costs that I only speculated about. Here is what she says, clarifying the pricing: 

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Google, in partnership with MTN Uganda, has launched 'Google SMS', a set of services that allows users in the country to access SMS information services.  These include, for example, access to health and agriculture tips, weather information, and news and sports.  Google offers these online information services aready on the web, but is now expanding them to SMS - however, at a high price per SMS. 

"We seek to serve a broad base of people -- not only those who can afford to access the Internet from the convenience of their workplace or with a computer at home," said Rachel Payne, Google's country manager for Uganda, in a post on the Google blog.

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Nova Spivack, a serial entrepreneir and CEO of twine.com, just issued a small $10,000 challenge for "Unblockable, Anonymous, Encrypted Mobile Internet Access."

From the challenge description:

Must work on mobile devices that are widely used in Asia (China in particular, but also Myanamar) and the Middle East (Iran for example). These are regions where State-sponsored Internet blocking is rampant.

Must be possible to download and install by a non-technical device owner using a simple one-click install, with an optional settings step and optional advanced settings.

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Where Ideas Navigate, or WIN, a technology service provider in the U.K., has said they will waive SMS fees for charities that use their services.

Hannah Jordan writes in Third Sector:

A company that provides charity text donation services is believed to be the first to waive its commission on donations to third sector organisations. Win handles ‘short code transactions', or texts to numbers of about five digits, between charities and donors. It usually receives between five and 10 pence per standard £1.50 text donation, but has said this week that it will waive the fee for charities and other not-for-profit organisations using its services. About 30 per cent of every text donation made to sector organisations in the UK is taken in charges by third-party service providers and mobile networks.

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It's been an eventful week here at MobileActive.org with much going on.  So it's only now that we are happy to announce that MobileActive.org is a 2009 Knight Foundation News Challenge Winner. The prize is for the Mobile Media Toolkit, a comprehensive directory of mobile tools and strategies that will allow anyone use mobile tech for citizen media and journalism. We believe that there is a critical need for better aggregation and presentation of tools, tech, and resources for citizens and media organizations around the world. MobileActive.org is one of nine winners, out of more than 3,000 applicants. 

For more, watch this video, courtesy of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University, where I explain what the Mobile Media Toolkit is all about.  Thank you, Knight Foundation, and Gary Kebbel, Knight Foundation journalism program director, for your support of our work. (video after the break)

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Reported by Leigh Jaschke and Melissa Loudon.

This spring, UNICEF Malawi and the UNICEF Innovations Team deployed RapidSMS to monitor child growth and nutrition.  We wrote about it previously here. 

Now there is a detailed report (pdf), evaluating the effort. The report, released on June 16th, was issued by Columbia University's School of Public Policy and Affairs (SIPA), UNICEF Malawi, UNICEF's Innovations team, and Mobile Development Solutions (MDS).

The report details the findings of the deployment, and outlines recommendations for the future use of SMS in Malawi. Raymond Short of Mobile Development Solutions says that,

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On July 5th, Mexicans will go to the polls to elect new members of the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of Congress. Two Mexican initiatives, Cuidemos El Voto and Anulo Mi Voto, are using SMS in different ways to make people's voices heard in what they fear will be a less-than-democratic election.

Cuidamos El Voto

By simply sending a text message, citizens will be able to report any voting irregularities or other problems.  But Oscar Salazar hopes that Cuidemos El Voto, the vote monitoring system, doesn't receive too many texts.

"We really hope that the number of incidents is low, this will mean Mexican democracy is for real," wrote Salazar in an email interview with MobileActive, who is coordinating the project. "However, if this is not the case, we want to provide NGOs and common citizens with the tools to enforce this process."

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