Cell Phones: The Hope Of Africa

Just over a year ago a well-recognized authority, Seth Berkley wrote an article in the "MIT Technology Review" regarding the improvement of health care in Africa due to the widespread use of cell phones there. Mr. Berkley has been nominated as Time Magazine's“100 Most Influential People in the World.”  and he has been CEO of several key international agencies. He pointed out that with cell phones there is better real-time reporting of disease surveillance and monitoring, much better data collection and thus better allocation of resources such as vaccines.

Further down the line, we can expect other advances through technological developments at the device end. Researchers like Jonathan Cooper at the University of Glasgow, in Scotland, are now developing ways to shrink huge, complex laboratory equipment onto tiny, disposable, acoustically driven microfluidic devices which can be plugged into a cell phone to turn it into a portable lab. Similarly, Aydogan Ozcan at the University of California, Los Angeles, is doing remarkable work enabling the cameras of cell phones to be used to perform fluorescent flow cytometry for diagnostic imaging. Eventually these kinds of technologies may enable health-care workers to carry out on-the-spot diagnostics for diseases in even the most remote of regions.

 

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He ends his article by predicting that even an improvement of 1% would reduce the deaths of children under the age of 5 by 69,000 per year. It's unfortunate what has happened in just the year since Mr. Berkley published his article. The spread of ebola has changed his hopeful predictions in certain countries (see map).

African countries most infected with ebola

Cell phones are still playing a key role. Another author, Amanda Puckett, a technical adviser for IntraHealth International,  has picked up the ball and reports about the use of cell phones after her return from Sierra Leon in September 2014.

Information is power, and cell phone reporting has given everyone a clearer version of the infection rate as well as what needs to be done. In addition, they are using a system called mHero (Health Worker Electronic and Response and Outreach). It has connected 19 African countries including the countries with ebola outbreaks, hopefully to keep it from spreading to other countries. It is also tied into UNICEF's SMS platform to make messaging services faster. It can also send health workers reliable information about treatment and prevention (as much as is known now).

mHero can immediately access health workforce data—including mobile phone numbers—from iHRIS and DHIS 2, allowing Ministry of Health users to create targeted communications for over 8,000 health workers of specific types (doctors, clinic officers, or pharmacists, for example) and in specific locations (such as the epicenter of an outbreak).

 

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In summary, cell phones are now being used for  a variety of functions besides communication - diagnosis, data collection, medical treatment procedures, disseminating reliable information to the "front line" workers and finally moral support to those who are risking their own lives to bring this epidemic under control.