Be Healthy, Be Mobile innovations
BHBM Innovations focuses on the following areas:
- Selecting and deploying a certain number of digital solutions for NCDs;
- Developing sustainability models that will help the solutions reach and maintain large-scale use;
- Monitoring the impact of these tools.
Beyond the mobile phone
BHBM has remained committed to creating health messaging content that is technology agnostic. This positions BHBM as a vehicle for sustainable innovation that is not pegged to a single technology, but that develops the digital health ecosystem as a whole. The most common medium for information dissemination thus far has been SMS text messages. However, a number of other messaging tools for different contexts are being actively explored, such as interactive voice response systems (IVRS), web-based messaging platforms, audio systems, and rugged tablet devices. These solutions are intended to accommodate users who prefer the Internet to text messaging, or those who are illiterate and unable to read or respond to a text message.
Digital innovations that are potentially relevant to NCDs go beyond knowledge dissemination tools. They include a broad range of technologies, such as smartphone applications, wearables, low-cost devices, artificial intelligence, machine learning and big data. The scale-up models for these solutions and technologies are expected to be different from traditional SMS models in a number of ways. Firstly, the evidence base for their use is less advanced than SMS. Secondly, national scale implementation costs will vary more broadly based on the type of devices, service costs, (including broadband connectivity), and longer-term device maintenance and updates. There are also a number of unresolved regulatory issues such as interoperability, security and data protection. All in all, whilst they may provide a much broader range of opportunities for preventing and controlling NCDs, their use is significantly more complex.
Examples of activities within BHBM Innovations: