mHealth, SMS, and African schools

I stopped in at Wayan Vota's TechSalon on mHealth at inveneo on Tuesday morning. (mHeatlh = "mobile health," essentially the use of phones, handheld computers and other portable devices to meet healthcare needs and improve healthcare systems.)

Karen Coppock, VP of VitalWave Consulting, presented information about their new-ish report culling trends and examples from over 50 mHealth projects. (A project that I worked on in 2003, Teledoc, was among the group they looked at.) 

The VitalWave report shows mHealth used for: 

• Remote monitoring (6 projects) 
• Remote data collection (14 projects)
• Communication and training for healthcare workers (5 projects) 
• Disease and epidemic outbreak training (7 projects)
• Diagnostic and treatment support (9 projects -- including the now-defunct but lamented Teledoc!)
• Education and awareness (6 projects)

Much, much attention was focused on SMS, used for one-to-one communication and used as a broadcast / narrowcast medium to reach mobile-phone users. SMS--because it's cheap, it's nearly ubiquitous (for those who can read), and connects directly to incentives in the form of airtime--is becoming the killer app for health, agriculture and community development in Sub-Saharan Africa. 

But not in education. Sure there are a few initiatives. And teachers have relatively high levels of mobile-phone ownership, (OK, I'm guessing here, prove me wrong). But the primary constituents--kids--don't own phones. And the few mLearning initiatives that target educators and schools, a couple in  Tanzania and South Africa, haven't really taken off. 

Whyzzat?

Here's an example: 

Vodacom and Nokia were collaborating to offer mobile based educational content to remote schools. The Project 'BrigeIT' uses a Nokia N95 and a TV set on the client side. A teacher is able to send an SMS to request material and a file is downloaded to the phone on such a request. This multi media file can be played back on the TV set. There are still some issues on energy that the project is grappling with.

 

Television -- even without broadcast content -- is NOT the killer app for schools in the region. Electricity, toxicity (what happens with those CRTs?) and the high cost of usable content are all barriers. Not to mention the fact that the data-download over Vodacom's GPRS network is going to cost _somebody_, even if that somebody is Vodacom for the purposes of the field test. 

Finally, why not just load ALL the damn content on a DVD and send the thing to the school so the teacher can browse without peering through the tiny aperture of her mobile phone screen at whatever index of, say, social studies content is sent in reply to her SMS? (Sure, portable DVD players cost somewhat more than CRT-based TVs, but they use way more power and release way more toxics at the end of their lifecycles. [Well, not way more, perhaps. But lots of lead...])

Where's the SMS-based teacher-development project that drives teachers to upgrade their subject knowledge and try new approaches in the classroom? Or OUT of the classroom?

(More on SMS and schools, and on the relationship of mHealth & eHealth, soon.)