Here’s a really interesting mhealth application: FLOW, an android app that you can download to your cell phone and go around to monitor the status and positions of water sources. I’ll let you read the article for more details, but the most enlightening thing I took from it was the story of what inspired FLOW. According to a government report a few years ago, there was enough water wells in a certain district of Malawi. But the developer decided to make a detailed check, going out to the district with a GPS tracker and mapping all the water wells. The findings: yes there were enough water wells, but they were poorly distributed! Some areas had more than enough, and others had barely any. So again, here we see this problem of distribution that we see with the HIV epidemic in developing countries – there’s plenty of drugs available, but how do we get it those that need it?

It’s great that such a simple mobile health application, using the continuously improving smart phones out there, was able to bring these questions/issues to attention. I’ll venture a guess that most of us here in Boston think of smart phones as iphones or blackberries: letting us check our email, watch a funny youtube clip, video chat with a friend across the country, or send pictures instantly of the 12 feet of snow that packed overnight. And for the health-minded thinkers out there, they’ll see smart phones as an instant Q&A for agricultural tips, a barcode scanner for identifying blood samples so that you don’t have to read through messy writing,  a GPS/questionnaire to pinpoint sources of disease outbreaks, a microscope, etc. Not surprisingly, people are already doing these things, but I’d like to see what other ideas are out there.

by Grace Wu