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workers in more than 20 sub-Saharan African
countries with the tools to make smart decisions
about critical public health issues, making it easier
to combat deadly diseases and save lives (http://
www.medicalnewstoday.com, 2009).
very successfully. In Uganda, it provides a perfect
example of how government organizations like
Uganda Chartered HealthNet (UCH) and local
academic institutions such as the Makerere Uni-
versity Faculty of Medicine can work together to
establish infrastructure for mHealth. A network
of handheld computers and mobile access points
has been built in these countries using existing
cellular networks and wireless access points to
deliver health care information between health
care workers and remote health centers. Initial
studies show that their platform is easy to adopt
by new users and that it can increase access to
up-to-date information on diseases such as HIV/
AIDS or malaria, but also on other health issues
such as child and maternal health. The Gather-
Data platform is part of AED-SATELLIFE and
is used in capturing pertinent health information,
alerting patients, and analyzing and reporting
their health data using mobile phones. Guide is
another component of AED-SATELLIFE. It is
the content management system used to collect
large clinical documents into a readable format
on small mobile screens.
Case Study II: FrontlineSMS
FrontlineSMS (http://www.frontlinesms.com/,
2010) is an open-source software that allows us-
ers to send text messages to individuals or groups
of people (which can be useful for fieldwork and
during surveys) through mobile phones. The ad-
vantage of FrontlineSMS is that it does not need
the Internet. It turns any two mobile devices,
such as a laptop, mobile device, or modem, into
a two-way group communication hub. The major
advantage of FrontlineSMS is that it can operate
in any area where there is a mobile signal. Sur-
veys can be targeted at a very large audience and
responses can be collected using text messaging.
The application allows data to be exported to Excel
spreadsheets for analysis later. This application
is being used by NGOs in the developing world
and since the software is free, it is very simple to
get started using existing infrastructure.
Case Study IV: Wearable
Health Sensors
Case Study III: AED-SATELLIFE
Singapore, though not a developing country, is in
the process of modernizing its health care practices
as part of the Intelligent Nation (iN2005) program
(http://www.ida.gov.sg, 2010), administered by
the Information Development Authority of Sin-
gapore. In the Changi General Hospital (CGH),
patients are monitored using wearable health sen-
sors using Bluetooth and WLAN technologies to
communicate patient information to hospital staff.
Although this idea is more appropriate for use in
the developed world, it is a good indication and
testing ground for the true potential of mHealth
elsewhere. CGH has successfully used this infra-
structure to allow self-administered monitoring,
real-time communication between patients and
caregivers, and security and confidentiality of
AED-SATELLIFE (http://www.healthnet.org/,
2010) is a perfect example of how mobile phones
can be used for better health in low resource en-
vironments as frequently found in the developing
world. This program has worked with local and
international NGOs and bilateral/multilateral
institutions working on development and data
collection tools using mobile sets and a wire-
less communication link to a remote computer.
They are now capable of packaging local and
international medical information and to put it in
the hands of personnel in areas where electricity,
telephone lines, and topics are scarce and Internet
connectivity is still not a reality. In Uganda and
Mozambique, AED-SATELLIFE has been used
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