The following are the notes that I took at The Mobile Collective’s thinkcamp mhealth on Friday 3 June this year. They are a collection of thoughts and questions that were sparked by the discussions and presentations that were given and by some of the conversations that I had with folk over the course of the day. I’m sharing them here as a reference for myself and those who attended. If anyone else who was there has shared their notes from the day, let me know and I’ll update this post to link to them.

My notes (in no particular order)

• How can mobile change the world of health care?
• Cheap phones + connectivity + cheap power ( solar / microwave generators) = better access to diagnosis and expert care for millions.
• How / what can the first world learn from the innovation in the third world when it comes to health care?
• Smartphones + connectivity + sensors / tracking apps could lead to behavioural change and monitoring of patients with long term illness – heart conditions – obesity – diabetes – asthma – etc.
• Patient data – who owns it? Who manages it? Who can access or amend it? How do you manage it? Only consistent point of reference for a record is the patient. Doctors, nurses, specialists all contribute but are passing encounters on a patients journey through life. Why isn’t the patient in charge?
• Can mobile games help change people’s health behaviour? Encourage kids to eat better, exercise more? Encourage people to stop smoking?
• Does gaming work for more elderly people as an incentive to change behaviour?
• Can new media change how people consume medical / health information? For example: drug packets that have short codes on them that will let users access additional information? Video demos of how to use the drugs, or warnings of how not to use them, regulatory messages, etc. could work for medical devices too.
• Could new media change how doctors in the field work too? Video demos of how to perform procedures, use equipment. – like iFitness and their video demos of each workout routine
• If an iPhone app can help ID a tree by leaf photo analysis (Leafsnap), could a similar app help diagnose a patients problem via photo database / expert systems based on symptom analysis? – used either by patients directly to help self diagnose, or used by medical professionals in the field to help them have access to the latest info and a group intelligence. Would work equally well for doctors in the first world in an office as for third world doctors in the field. First world gets desktop web version, third world gets mobile web version.
• Epidemic and mobile? Could a twitter feed provide real time epidemic spread data? Individual symptom data with geotagging to track the spread and and severity of the infection. Could you crowd source the spread data to better understand the need for quarantine zones?
• What would make you change your behaviour? And how would mobile connectivity / applications encourage you to do so?
• How do you engage people to report non events? Can it be done?
• Information is not enough to engage behavioural change, people who haven’t yet changed after seeing information campaigns are not going to. How do you give people the incentive they need to make big changes in their lives? Gameification, social pressure, peer pressure?