Saving lives with a mobile phone

The most effective weapon against Ebola and other humanitarian crises is often knowledge – and mobile technology is playing a key role

At the time of writing, west Africa is in the grip of the worst outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus recorded since it was first identified in 1976. The current outbreak is exactly the kind of pandemic global governments have feared for decades: it kills between 50% and 60% of all infected patients, has no known cure and is threatening to spread through the transit networks.

After basic sanitation and hygiene, the most effective way of stopping Ebola from spreading is information: myths about it and mistrust of doctors have compounded basic infrastructure problems and kept it circulating in areas where it could have been controlled. “This is the first time an Ebola outbreak has occurred in West Africa,” says Aliou Boly, Program Manager for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) in Guinea. “So there are a lot of misconceptions and rumors – that the disease is spread through the air, for example.”

In many parts of rural Africa – where Ebola has proved most virulent – there’s a relatively new information conduit that could become a lifesaving champion: the mobile phone. The latest figures from research firm Gallup suggest that 80% of households in sub-Saharan Africa have access to a mobile phone, while a 2013 report from the World Bank found that fewer than 15% of rural households have access to electricity. It’s no surprise, then, that mobile health services – or mHealth – provide a cost-effective way to educate citizens and support healthcare givers.

Natural disaster relief
In Sierra Leone, says Boly, the IFRC has deployed its Trilogy Emergency Relief Application (TERA). In 2010, Haiti suffered an earthquake that killed 220,000 people, left vast swathes of the population homeless and devastated the country’s infrastructure. Recognizing that the most efficient way to reach large numbers of people was by sending SMS messages to their phones, the IFRC began work on TERA with one of the local mobile operators.

What makes TERA stand out is its ability to send messages to users in a particular geographical location. In Haiti, TERA helped organize the aid camps in which people sheltered, provided updates on nearby food and sanitation supplies and served as an early warning system for cases of cholera.

“In an emergency, unlike other systems, we don’t need people to subscribe to our notifications,” says the Red Cross’s Sharon Reader. “We can just get messages out to all of a network’s customers.”

Improving mothers’ and babies’ lives
The GSMA, a global organization of mobile operators and related technology companies, believes there’s even more that can be done to promote good practice in mHealth. In 2012, it launched the Pan-African mHealth Initiative (PAMI) with the aim of promoting maternal healthcare and childhood nutrition using mobile phones.

PAMI has recently expanded to include a new mHealth program, Mobile for Development, under which the GSMA is bringing together partners such as Samsung, MTN, Hello Doctor and Gemalto to formulate and promote best practices and commercial solutions to some of the continent’s health problems.

As part of the initiative, people will receive mHealth and nutrition services through SmartMessage, an interactive messaging solution. This will simplify the relationship between patients and health stakeholders and give targeted nutritional and health advice via mobile phones. For this to happen, new mHealth services will need to be connected to vulnerable groups across the region, to send recommendations by interactive SMS or on dynamic handset menus.

Allowing people to chat with a healthcare specialist through interactive SMS enables diagnostics, data collection and surveillance, plus health financing and health surveys that can be launched at national scale through mobile phones to gather information. It will also enable governments and healthcare providers to make appropriate decisions and brings a whole new dimension to the way healthcare services providers and patients could engage and communicate remotely.