Kenya Uses Phones to Improve Public Health

Cell phones will soon be used to register births and deaths in Kenya, another way mobile technology is working to improve public health in developing nations.

A Health Metrics Network program called Monitoring of Vital Events, or MOVE-IT, aims to speed up and improve birth and death recording in three districts in the African nation. Tens of millions of births and deaths currently go unreported in Kenya, leading to a lack of data necessary for making accurate public health policy and program decisions.

Under MOVE-IT, community health workers use RapidSMS, a free, open-source framework, to send a text message to local authorities about a birth or death in their designated area. A registration agent receives the message containing specific details about the event, then uses OpenXdata, an open-source software for designing Web-based forms on mobile devices, to register the event with Kenya's Department of Civil Registration...