Mobile Phones To Fill Poor Nations' Healthcare Gap?

Ian Lamont writes "The Industry Standard has reported on a couple of projects that aim to turn the humble mobile phone into a tool that can improve healthcare systems in the developing world. While poor countries lack adequate healthcare facilities, many have booming mobile phone use, even in rural areas. One company spawned by the MIT Media Lab seeks to leverage widespread mobile phone use with a Java app that lets community workers refer patients for treatment, fill out questionnaires about patient health and send real-time information back to doctors at health clinics. Another hardware-focused project started by a group of researchers at UCLA aims to create a device that can be attached to mobile phones and test blood samples for HIV, malaria, and other diseases, and send the test results to a hospital. However, it's not clear whether most mobile phones in developing countries can support these technologies, or if local healthcare infrastructures can effectively use the data generated by mobile phones."

Comments

Sounds Good

[AnonGCB]

Once you get mobile phones into the hands of average people, along with the test kits. Then there's the danger of people sharing the devices and transmitting diseases from one to another. I think I would rather get to a hospital, where it could be done right.

Re:Sounds Good

[mabhatter654]

Sad to say many, many places in the USA up to the 1950's only got hospitals if somebody rich built them or a church society founded them. That's why so many have big names or Saint.. attached to them, even ones that are now "public".

Convergence?

[cbiltcliffe]

I've heard of convergence, but I think this is taking it a little far. Why do companies that want to design a device, function, whatever, always immediately think "Let's make a mobile phone that does that!!"

What the hell makes you think a cellphone would make a good mobile health lab? One person with HIV or malaria is going to get one of these, test themselves, not clean it properly, then infect the rest of the village as they run around testing everybody else.
Most places needing this type of testing won't even have clean water, much less an autoclave, which is what you really need to properly sterilize any medical equipment like this.

Here's an idea:
Rather than making it a cellphone attachment, build a small device, the size of a big toolbox, or a bit bigger, that will do what's needed. Put a decent battery in it, solar panels and a wind generator, and a small autoclave. Make it as automated as possible.
Bingo. Renewable energy powered, clean and safe health testing for a village. Then, you can use the power and heat capabilities of this thing to boil water, and get non-malaria-infected water for these people to drink, too.

Try that with a cellphone.

Morons.

Re:Convergence?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I don't think that this is a "brown people are incapable of hygiene" thing; but a "the world over, expensive medical equipment has a way of being reused under economic pressure, unless fairly strong constraints are in place" thing.

Even in modern, western, deeply-afraid-of-malpractice-suits medical settings, medical devices are commonly engineered with hope of avoiding unsafe reuse in mind. Just look at the number of single-use syringe designs, for example.

Re:which poor nations

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

"Healthcare" isn't really a unitary phenomenon.

High-end American healthcare? Quite probably the best, no big surprise that people would come for that, if they can afford it.

Average American healthcare? Not bad at all, definitely first world; but, per dollar spent, surprisingly sucky.

Lower than average American healthcare? Pretty unexciting. The number of uninsured people who get to let their chronic and/or preventable conditions fester until they are severe enough for the ER is bad news.

That's the thing: America has some of the best healthcare available; but that care isn't widely available, and the lower tiers fall off rather sharply, especially when you account for things beyond immediate medical outcomes(be cured is nice, not becoming homeless in the process, though, would also be nice). It's actually pretty similar to our educational system. Our best is really, really good; but we manage to pay extraordinary amounts for mediocrity or worse, as well.