Mobile Technology at Mobile World Congress Barcelona

We were in Barcelona last week visiting the Mobile World Congress to look at what new mobile technologies are coming out but to also meet a variety of people who are providing a variety of health and well being services using mobile technologies.

One that caught my eye, and indeed who were up for a prize, was mHealth Tanzania Partnership who are using mobile phones on a nationwide project ‘Healthy Pregnancy, Healthy Baby‘ to reach pregnant mothers offering free text messaging in Swahili to help reduce mortality rates.

There were many companies and organisations offering a wide variety of mhealth solutions from aggregating information for people with different illnesses to providing health and advice and loads who could monitor the number of steps you take in a day.  One really good one was to use your mobile phone to take a photograph of a persons eye, who might be suffering from some eye condition. This image could then be sent to a GP enabling them to make an assessment on the condition.  Great benefit of this was that it saves the patient and GP a great deal of time and provides an instant record of the consultation.

MWC was huge and after 4 days and visiting 8 halls we still missed some of what was going on. What was clear though was that the tidal wave of movement towards delivering public and private services using mobile technology is the way forward.  Consumers are being offered incredible mobile tools, such as phones and tablets, that can do many different things and after being at MWC we got a glimpse of the future.

For an insight as to what it was about visit www.mobileworldcongress.com