Mobile Technology

Mobile health or mHealth is broadly defined as the use of mobile devices such as phones to support medical and public health practice. mHealth has particularly gained momentum in Africa, where rapid growth in mobile phone penetration has been seen as a potential solution to lever human, economic, and infrastructure weaknesses of the health system. Specifically, the use of the least expensive mobile phone function, text-messaging or Short Message Service (SMS), has been recently deployed in many small-scale projects to facilitate disease and outbreak surveillance, supply chain, treatment compliance, quality of care, [Page 1056]hospital attendance, and public health awareness. Despite a paucity of evaluations to demonstrate the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of SMS interventions, those interventions targeting patients’ adherence to medications, health workers’ adherence to guidelines, ...