Mobile Health Around the Globe

We’ve read the stories: From bedridden patients sending text messages to their health workers, to young people receiving HIV prevention messages via SMS, the mobile phone seems to have morphed from communications device to essential life-saver. But is the evidence there yet that mHealth is an effective and suitable health delivery intervention in the developing world?[read more]

This is a great video from a keynote by Professor Alain Labrique for the MOOC Mobile Health without Borders from Stanford. Professor Labrique is the Director of Johns Hopkins University Global mHealth Initiative, and world expert and pioneer on mHealth. The video is an overview of mobile health innovations around the globe.[read more]

What health boards need to do is to ‘mobilise’ each healthcare professional's entire job, using the latest generation of mobile solutions. These overcome issues of limited and clumsy web-based access to existing back-office systems by providing native smartphone and tablet apps that draw together the information and tools staff need to support them as they work.[read more]

State-of-the-art broadband services still don’t reach many parts of the African continent, especially rural villages. But one consumer technology is pervasive: cell phones. According to the Cisco VNI Service Adoption Forecast, there will be 1.3 billion consumer mobile devices across the Middle East and Africa by 2016 – a billion of them being basic feature phones, not smartphones.[read more]

Spring: A time of restoring and renewing. A time of plans and projects. A time for spring cleaning. A time when most people want to clean out garages, closets and junk drawers. You know the drawers we're talking about—especially the one that serves as a graveyard of old cell phones and electronics. As springtime arrives, what if you could give new life to those old cell phones?[read more]

Physicians Interactive just announced a partnership with Teche Action Board and through the help of Health eVillages will start providing help to healthcare professionals in southern rural Louisiana, an area heavily affected by the BP oil spill.[read more]

Science Foundation Ireland and the Royal College of Surgeons Ireland (RCSI), have joined forces to develop an on-line 3D guide showing the human body in motion from the outside in. Anatomists, artists and engineers have collaborated on this project using color, illustration and 3D technology. The 4 hour teaching program will shortly be part of the curriculum/training for medical students in Dublin, Bahrain and Kuala Lumpur.[read more]

We needn’t read another market forecast or research report to know: Cloud computing is poised to help revolutionize nearly every aspect of modern healthcare. Likewise, we don’t have to dip into our RSS feeds to realize significant challenges to broad adoption of cloud within the sector remain — not least of which are regulatory hurdles and security concerns. But while its widespread application has yet to be seen, it’s important to consider how cloud is already making a difference at a much smaller, more personal scale — by improving the lives of patients in need.[read more]

Medic Mobile is an organization based in San Francisco that uses mobile technology to help their partners with global health projects. After a successful project in Malawi, Medic Mobile has helped more than 30 organizations improve health services in over 15 countries.[read more]

EXCLUSIVE POST - While this mobile health (mHealth) initiative was set-up with the idea that it would facilitate communication, no analysis of the CUG [Closed User Group] had been conducted to-date. Therefore, the researchers sought to assess if and how the CUG ‘disrupted’ the traditional social/communication structure.[read more]

This video interview is actually a continuation of our Mobile Health Around the Globe post this week on Nadi Kaonga's social networking analysis of the Millennium Villages project in Ghana....Social networking analysis was done on the CUG (closed user group) of cell phone users. The analysis showed that the traditional social structure which was hierarchical and followed a rigorous chain of command was disrupted by the introduction of the mobile phones. Communication was freer, more open and more direct.[read more]

eMocha (electronic Mobile Open-source Comprehensive Health Application) is an open-source mHealth application that was developed by the Johns Hopkins Center for Clinical Global Health Education and the PEPFAR Uganda Distance Learning Initiative. eMocha delivers knowledge to the point of care, using mobile technology to help community workers gather data and educate about healthcare through multimedia training.[read more]