Mobile phones become key tool for health workers
Posted by MattE on 18 Feb 2007 at 10:45 am | Tagged as: Communications, SMS
The lack of effective internet and land line telephony services in African countries may have led to a new development being launched that will allow effective communications between health field staff and health authorities.
Mobile communications is expanding rapidly in most African countries and provides the fastest way to provide telecommunications in places where running copper or optic fibre cable is unfeasible or too costly in current economic conditions. Sixty percent of the population in developing African countries now live in areas with mobile coverage, with 85 percent expected to be in a coverage footprint by 2010.
It is intriguing, however, as to why this has only just been implemented when the data input technology has been available for a number of years. I guess the answer is politics.
Phones for Health will allow health workers in the field to use a standard Motorola handset equipped with a downloadable application to enter health data. Once entered, the data is transferred via a packet based mobile connection ( GPRS ) into a central database. If GPRS isn’t available, the software can use a SMS data channel to transmit the information. The data is then mapped and analyzed by the system, and is immediately available to health authorities at multiple levels via the web. The system also supports SMS alerting and other tools for return communication with field staff.
Tags: developing contries | Technology | Phone | mobile | HANDSET | global | data | countries | Africa | SMS | Health | gprs | AIDS
