In mid-December, I had the opportunity to attend a poster session and hear presentations by teams from the NextLab class at MIT. The NextLab course is taught by Jhonatan Rotberg and Luis Sarmenta and is part of the larger Next Billion Network initiative.
In the course, project teams were tasked with using mobile technologies — in most cases, mobile phones — to meet the needs of users in developing countries. Students in the class not only researched and designed these technologies, but also worked on their deployment, teaming with organizations within each target country.
While the NextLab course is not focused on healthcare, there were two projects that stood out to me as highly promising in the realm of global health:
The NextMap team has developed an mobile technology that can either run on a smart phone (with a Java client) or via SMS and leverages in-phone GPS technology to tag data with the geographic location at which that data was collected. The information logged at that location is uploaded to a central database with the coordinates of the location, so that the data can be plotted on a map. In their presentation, they covered several applications, including environmental monitoring and disaster risk reduction. The disaster case example involved residents of rural villages in northern India, plagued by floods that come down from Nepal and wipe out their land, using SMS messages to send and track information about impending floods. The incumbent system involved mailed-in forms, which took weeks to process, but the residents only have about 8 hours to react once the floods reach the northern border of India!
They did not discuss a health-related application of their technology, but I believe that such a low-cost and easy-to-deploy solution could have applications in global health, whether it be for monitoring drug supplies at remote clinics or reporting incidents of disease to stem the tide of an outbreak.
Moca, or Mobile Care, is much more medically-focused than NextLab. The Moca team has developed a mobile client which they demonstrated on Google’s Android platform. The client allows health workers in developing countries to capture data about a patient — notes, photos, videos, voice comments — and upload them to a central server running OpenMRS. Doctors at the central health center are able to read, analyze, and diagnose patient conditions from cases in a wide geographic area, but very quickly. This improvement in efficiency allows the health workers to get an answer without having to request that the patient return for a future visit to hear their diagnosis — a big win in parts of the world where patients must walk miles over treacherous terrain in order to reach a clinic. Moca Demo Overview Video
For more on mobile technology for healthcare, here are a few links to discussions and resources available in the Technology Community of GHDonline:
- A Mobile Health: The potential of mobile telephony to bring healthcare to the majority
This paper looks at the possibilities, development and implications offered by mobile technologies to support and improve the delivery of health care services in Latin America, where there is an estimated 70% mobile penetration.
- FrontLine SMS Initiative: Quantified Impact for Rural TB Program
A free software that turns a laptop connected to a phone (or GSM modem) into a central SMS hub.
- Cost and implementation analysis of a personal digital assistant (PDA) system for laboratory data collection
A great paper that showed that a PDA-based system deployed in Lima, Peru, drastically decreased the effort required to collect tuberculosis laboratory results from remote locations.
