Almost a year ago, I blogged about the Text4baby sms service launched to much fanfare by the US government (including HHS and the White House) along with a consortium of carriers and industry.  As I noted, initial results weren't great in terms of reaching the target audience of pregnant women:

they have only managed to sign up 22,327 moms in 6 weeks.  That means that so far they've covered about 0.5% of the approximately 4.3 million births per year in the US

MSH presented today at a meeting of the Hopkins-affiliated mHealth Working Group.  I wasn't able to attend, but was glad to see the slides posted by the working group: nice overview of an EpiSurveyor implementation in Malawi for monitoring malaria drug supplies (the project report was described in this previous blog entry).

As we all know by now, mobile phone use is skyrocketing.  In Columbia, for example, there are more mobile subscribers per 100 inhabitants than in the US (92 vs 87 as of 2008 data)! And in Africa, about 40% of the population owns a mobile phone –  from essentially zero ownership 10 years ago. 

There is a lot of talk these days about "mHealth", but there's another way that mobiles are affecting health: as a labor-saving device.

Just read an article from the Times of India entitled "New tech to keep tabs on disease", where the new tech in question is the collection of data for health on mobile phones.

Health researchers in Cameroon, led by Dr. Mbah Patrick Okwen (health consultant to the Netherlands Development Organization) have been using EpiSurveyor for the last few years to collect critical data concerning a variety of topics including child nutritional status monitoring, community mutual health organizations, investigating governance at hospitals, and watershed and grazing pastures mapping to reduce water contamination and conflict.  Without the need for any international consultants!

I had the pleasure of being in the audience as Vodafone Group CEO Vittorio Colao spoke at the mHealth Summit in London last week, and was astonished to find him mentioning our very own EpiSurveyor as an example of the power of mobile technology for public health. He noted, correctly, that EpiSurveyor enables workers to make quicker, better and much more informed responses, and leads to much more informed policy making.

Development Gateway has put up a link to the UNF/VF report on mHealth: