Mobile Services & Technologies

Over the last decade, expansion of cell phone service has been nothing less than revolutionary in even the poorest nations. Worldwide, the number of mobile phone subscriptions now exceeds fixed telephone lines by a ration of 4 to 1. As of 2009, 90% of the world’s population has access to a cell phone signal and there are over 4 billion cell phone subscriptions, with adoption growing rapidly in developing countries.

The rapid escalation in both cell phone coverage areas and cell phone users in developing countries has created a unique opportunity to improve a wide range of applications and services that contribute to reducing disparities in poor communities. Focusing initially on health, the Blum Center seeks to respond to this opportunity by implementing several projects that take advantage of information and communications technology (ICT) improvements to expand and improve health-related services to rural populations.

• CellScope: Developing a durable, portable and high magnification microscope for use in underserved rural areas where clinical-quality microscopes are often unavailable for critical disease screening, blood sample analysis and disease diagnosis.
• Ambient Gas Plasma: Designing a low-cost, portable device that disinfects medical equipment and help reduce medically-transmitted infections.
• The SEND Project: Creating an innovative network of mobile devices that can be used to diagnose, track and decrease transmission of neglected tropical diseases.
• Mobile Phones for Literacy: Utilizing cheap short message services (SMS) to turn mobile phones into an adult literacy platform in Niger.
• Smartphones for Better Health: Using the data and communication capacity of mobile phones to support an innovative voucher-based program for disease treatment.

Other Related Projects at UC Berkeley

MILLEE: This project uses cell phones to teach English as a second language to children in India, China, and now Spanish-native children in the US. MILLEE began in the Electrical Engineering & Computer Science department at UC Berkeley and now has collaborations with Carnegie Mellon University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing.

First Days: This is an NSF-sponsored project to improve maternal health in rural India by improving the efficacy of village-level health workers. The project takes advantage of mobile phones capabilities to target issues of training, credibility and accountability of these health workers so that they are better able to persuasively promote healthy behaviors among women in their village. Research on First Days has received a couple of best paper awards recently.