Mobile Phones May Bring Better Health Care to Poor Countries

The Rockefeller, Vodafone, and UN foundations recently launched an initiative to use mobile phone and computer technology to improve health care in the developing world. The Mobile Health Alliance, or mHealth, will capitalize on the pervasiveness of mobile phones to foster social and economic development, the foundations say. The initiative was announced at the Feb. 16-19 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

"We're seeing penetration reach 2.2 billion customers in emerging markets," said Claire Thwaites, head of the UN and Vodafone Technology Partnership. "We look at the level of [personal computers] penetration, that's at 305 million PCs in the developing world."

Text messaging could be used to "improve population awareness about malaria prevention or how to prevent HIV/AIDS [and] what precautionary measures need to be taken," Thwaites said. "Or you could use mobile to support public health data collection campaigns or immunization campaigns. Then you get to more sophisticated uses of mobile to support consultation and remote diagnosis, as well as communicate with health workers, which there's a huge lack of in the developing world."

"In Uganda, there is a program called 'Text for Change' that's informing the population about preventive measures to avoid HIV/AIDS," Thwaites said. "And what we've seen through that program is a 40 percent increase in people taking HIV tests."

Organizers plan to host a large mHealth conference by the end of this year and will invite private and public partners to join the effort.

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