Medical+Advice

Medical Advice

__Mobile Phones for health education__

Lack of health education knowledge and access to television/ the Internet can limit attempts to educate people through these mediums and dire literacy rates or a wide range of spoken languages can create a whole diversion of errors and situational problems. One thing that many health projects have looked at is the number of mobile phones that are used. Even in relatively poor areas, mobile phones are extremely common. So health projects take advantage of this to make people aware of the health problems out there in the world.

Mobile phones have the advantage of allowing large numbers of messages to be sent at low cost and they can make it easier to customise messages to take into account the different languages that are used.

With the realisation of anonymity, mobile phones are an excellent way to access knowledge. You can research information about health issues on your phone and therefore you don't have to occur the possibility of embarrassment by visiting people to talk about them. With mobile phones people, especially the young people, can be notified by health departments about severe diseases like HIV/AIDS - it is quick and be sent to numerous people without embarrassment.

Project Masiluleke is a health project.Project Masiluleke is designed to harness the mobile phone as a high-impact, low-cost tool in the fight against HIV/AIDS and TB. Nearly a hundred percent of South Africans have access to a mobile device and the project will touch virtually every one of them. Conservative estimates indicate Project Masiluleke could mobilize hundreds of thousands to get tested in the first year alone. 300% increase of people now phone in via the technique about HIV.

Uganda uses text to change as a technique. This sends short quiz questions to mobile phone users to help raise awareness. It's free and the text messages are then answered.

India uses the "Freedom HIV/AIDS" project, this is mobile phone games. It relates to the culture and uses cricket as a theme. It has over 10.3 million game downloads. It was so successful that in 2006 it expanded to two further games, in English and Kiswahili.

Save the children took a different approach and used a 20 minute video with well known actors, in Georgia. It highlighted HIV/AIDS. It was converted to video on a mobile phone format and sent out to people.