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Mobile Phone Technology Features
Mobile phone offers so many services and applications to the users. The features for
most mobile are similar; the difference is the way, how people use those features.
The paper will discus the following features through four case studies.
- SMS Message
- Phone call
- Camera
- Software Application
Benefits
- Portability
It is not simply can carry to anywhere, but most important it is minimize the
distance for the health service access.
- Cheap
The massive manufacture drop the price down to make most people possible
have one.
- Ability to contact emergency
Special for health situation, it is important for people keep in touch for most
constricted situation.
- Exchange for information
There are many way can use the mobile phone to transfer data or information to
the patient or interaction between the patient and clinical.
Case study of mobile camera: Diagnosis of parasitic worm infections
Soil-transmitted parasitic worms, or helminthes, affect two billion people around
the world. People in rural setting in developing counties like Africa with really poor
health conditions, are disproportionately affected especially for children (Mendoza
et al., n.d.). It is easily leading chronic infections that manifest as malnutrition or
anemia, which might result in very poor physical or even some mental problems.
Over 270 million preschool-age children and over 600 million school-age children
live in areas where these parasites are intensively transmitted, and are in need of
treatment and preventive interventions (Who.int, 2014).
The examining stool with the microscope and also decent light source required for
the standard helminth diagnosis, most important there has to be a person trained to
use, however, all of those normally are not available for people in rural area like
Africa. For solving such problem in a affordable cost in such constricted area, the
researcher create a new microscopy by using the mobile phone camera. A 3mm ball
lens mounted to the camera just using double-sided tape and a small hole was
punctured in the tape to emit light from the camera through the ball lens. Then
people just placed the stool sample less than 1mm from the ball lens and capture the
image with flashlight on (Mendoza et al., n.d.). This new, innovative and cost
effective microscope, which only cost USD$8-10 to modify the cell phone camera to
test children’s stool sample (IRINnews, 2014).
Evaluation and result
Even though not as sensitive as the traditional light microscope, the mobile phone
microscope revealed a sensitivity of 69.4 percent and a specificity of 61.5 percent for
detecting any soil-transmitted parasitic worm infection. "Mobile phone microscopy
has been used in the laboratory setting, but we thought it would be a good idea to
test it in a real-world setting," Isaac Bogoch, the lead investigator of the study and a
doctor at Toronto General Hospital, told IRIN. "We need to improve the image quality
and get a better lens and better slides, but it is quite close to the gold standard."
(IRINnews, 2014). As the doctor Isaac Bogoch mentioned, there are limitation for
this function, but it is already huge improve and great help for the people living rural
area for the parasitic worm health care. The unbelievable low cost and no need of
special trained people to use, we can see there will be dramatically effect in point-of
care tests in resource constrained rural area. With the cellphone camera quality
improve; we can see the huge health improvement like parasitic worm infection also
can be used for other similar disease.
