Medtech providers: If you haven’t got a big budget, but you want to incorporate mobile healthcare (m-health,or also commonly known as telehealthcare), where do you start?

Start with short messaging service (SMS). Always go for the lowest common denominator.

Broadband internet access and power-guzzling servers might be the norm at health facilities in the first world, but if the power grids are bad, and the monthly internet access costs a fortune, forget “e-health”.

For some time, the stakeholders in m-health have been devising imaginative ways of deploying phone-based applications, but not in sophisticated, corporatised health environments. They take place in the rural areas of developing countries across the world.

For a start, the clients that these organisations serve are strapped for cash. Digital communications, even medical supplies, are basic. The infrastructure can be inadequate. What the clients are guaranteed to have, however, are mobile phones.

SMS runs on any type of mobile phones.

A report released in December 2009 by the United Nations and Vodafone Foundation Partnership examines the various ways digital technologies are used in humanitarian crises, which should give us some ideas on how to do it on a budget.

Co-authored by Diane Coyle and Patrick Meier, New Technologies in Emergencies and Conflicts: The Role of Information and Social Networks examines a few models used for preparedness, alert, response and reconstruction.

FrontlineSMS, designed by social anthropologist Ken Banks, is an inspiration on how to make do with existing hardware. It mobilises rural communities using a technology that runs on a laptop or a notebook, hooked up with a mobile phone and a memory card.

The Riff, rolled out in 2006, was created by the non-profit group Innovative Support to Emergencies, Diseases and Disasters (InSTEDD). Running on an open source platform, it pools together health-related event indicators from a wide variety of information sources such as SMS, RSS feeds, emails and online documents.

Its automatic classification includes seven syndromes, ten transmission modes, more than 100 infectious diseases, 180 microorganisms, 140 symptoms, and more than 50 chemicals.

Like The Riff, Ushahidi is also open source. The website was developed to map outbreaks of violence in Kenya in 2008, using data transmitted via SMS, Twitter and Google Maps.

UNOSAT, launched much earlier in 2000, uses geospatial information to monitor and organise the movements of people during and after a crisis.

So what’s the deal with geospatial system and satellite technologies?

Geospatial technology is already incorporated in many supply chain and logistics services in developed countries. Using a handheld terminal that behaves like barcode or chip scanner and a telephone, hauliers and warehouse operators can pinpoint the location of the delivery man using GPS technology, and they can place the product movements in the supply chain at real time.

For safety reasons, and tracking and tracing purposes, medical device and drugs manufacturers also have their products barcoded and chipped. For hospitals to profile the movements and the usage of the products, they have the ‘tagged’ or ‘labelled’ items scanned, and the data entered into the computer system.

Now imagine if you can extend the technologies employed by the hauliers and warehouses to smartphones that can read chips and barcodes. The smartphones are also able to pinpoint the location of a device using GPS.

GPS, or global positioning system, is facilitated by satellite technology. Geospatial technology enables you to visualise the movement of your device.

These technologies are already in existent, in rural settings, with some running on open source platforms.

What a mobile phone can run, however, depends not just on its hardware specifications, but by the system that enables the data to be transferred. If cables are impossible to deploy, or are too expensive, the alternative is satellite communications.

But there are satellites, and there are satellites. The basic requirement is for voice data to get transmitted. No voice, no telephone. SMS normally runs on this basic wave spectrum. Better satellites can allow voice, SMS and images to be deployed by the phone.

Only when data transfer gets to the audiovisual recording stage that diagnostic applicationss such as saliva testing, microscope, stethoscope and so on can be realised on the smartphones. We commonly recognise this method as MMS, or multimedia messaging.

The good thing about the likes of United Nations, Vodafone and some aid agencies is that they don’t try to cram a sophisticated technology made for first world hospital for the rural communities. Rather, they tailor the technology to follow the human beings. That’s how they get m-health right.

Vodafone has also partnered up with IBM and Novartis on a project called “SMS for Life”.

Using mobile phones, SMS and websites, they track and manage the supply of Artemisinin-based Combination Therapy (ACT) drugs and Quinine injectables in rural areas in Tanzania that are vulnerable to malaria. This is done for the Roll Back Malaria Partnership.

IBM provided the architecture for the system, and Vodafone, partnering with MatsSoft, developed an SMS system that would help ensure dispensaries did not run out of stock.

Vodafone says that during the first few weeks of the pilot, the number of health facilities with "stock-outs" in one district alone went down by 75%.

It’s good to talk and it’s good to do it by starting simple.

Isn’t it great to see a technology being used to make people get on with one another, and collaborate over a positive goal?

I hope I get to report on many of such instances for 2010.

Salina Christmas is also doing a postgrad degree in Digital Anthropology at University College London. She's interested to hear more about mobile phone initiatives relating to healthcare in rural settings across the globe.