Digital Health: Diverse Implications and Incredible Potential
There’s no denying that technology is increasingly realizing its potential towards better health, helping share crucial information to prevent, cure, understand or even express ill-health in both personal or professional approaches, from the intimate cathartic cancer blogs its sufferers pour their experiences onto, the symptom checkers and ask-a-doc! telemedicine websites which provide information and consultation online, to the medical articles that publish the latest research findings in health, and the apps that diagnose illness or encourage healthier lifestyles in competitive appealing games. The implication of digital health is different across the world. While the western world utilizes more its advancements towards a ‘quantified self’: the ambition to document and quantify the self (its calorie intake, heart rate, steps, sleep cycle, etc) — to keep track and better maintain and improve upon an already-healthy lifestyle, the implication of these digital advancements in Third World countries is utilized in a more fundamental way, with great impact in countries such as Africa where healthcare is underfunded.
Much has changed over the years, where before a doctor was required to utilize their knowledge and medical equipment to diagnose malaria or monitor diabetes, this can now be done with increasingly efficient smart-phone apps, such as ‘Pocket Diagnosis’, described by its developer as a potential “substitute for laboratory equipment, saving money to clinics and research institutions,” (Science Daily 2014). Apps such as these are especially important in places with limited, unavailable, underfunded healthcare. It accelerates the process; reducing the steps previously necessary towards health. The long journey (oftentimes hours away by foot- and this, remember, done by the already unwell individual), followed by queues, waiting lists, forms and paperwork, and finally a doctor with the medical equipment and knowledge to diagnose, are now steps which may potentially be skipped; saving energy and resources while also allowing more people to be helped overall.
The smart-phone becomes the ultrasound, the stethoscope, the doctor, a means to diagnosis, a place to gain awareness of preventative measures and to guide the individual towards a healthier lifestyle. It is more efficient, and gives a sense of empowerment to the individual who would have previously been more vulnerable and helpless.
To the mother in the isolated village in Africa who discovers how to treat their child suffering from water poisoning, it could mean the difference between life and death.
Telemedicine has allowed rural populations access to centrally-located specialists. In India, this has cut the costs of treating end-stage kidney patients by 90% (internetmedicine.com). In South Africa, where 310 mothers die for every 100,000 births, it has given hope to expectant mothers with the MAMA (Mobile Alliance for Maternal Action); creating 5 mobile channels aimed to ‘support, inform and empower moms, and women of child-bearing age in South Africa’ (MAMA 2012).
As mentioned at the start of this commentary, the digitalization of health has different implications to different cohorts. While it offers potentially life-saving facilities to those in Third World countries, it offers potentially life-improving, health ‘tweaking’ strategies to those in first world countries in its opportunities to quantify and monitor various aspects of their lives.
These differences in the way digital health is utilized might be understood in terms of Maslow’s hierarchal theory of needs. While the digitalization of health in Third World populations is concerned with meeting the more basic psychological and survival needs, on the other end of the spectrum, in first-world countries where most of the individual’s needs are met- there is room to further the self’s evolution; empowering the often already-healthy self in becoming healthier still.
And as Apps for health continue to be developed to increase their scope in facilitating a diversity of health-related needs, Such as MobiSante’s development of ‘smart-phone based ultrasound device’ (Center for Health Market Innovations 2015) which enables ultrasound to be performed anywhere, it is quite exciting to realize the potential of these mobile facilitators towards health in rural areas. Eryn Gable in Developing Countries Lead the Way for Mobile Health Technologies reveals that, while individuals in Third World countries are less likely to own or have access to computers, they will often own mobile phones. And so the implication of such apps in Third World countries is one that makes urgent the development of its accommodating infrastructures of wireless networks. It is a concern essential enough to have prompted a meme of an adapted version of Maslow’s theory, one that includes Wifi at the bottom of the list.
And why not? access to internet, as we have seen- has the ability to facilitate and answer to the needs of individuals at the bottom of this hierarchy, those in rural areas, in Third World countries. It is a step towards increasing empowerment, and improving the overall health and wellbeing of vulnerable populations.
References:
Science Daily (2014) Pocket Dignosis: App turns portable smartphone into a portable medical diagnostic device. Available at: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/03/140319103612.html
Mobile Health for Maternal Action (2012). Available at:http://www.askmama.co.za
Gable, E (2015) Developing Countries Lead the Way for Mobile Health Technologies. Health Market Innovations. Available at: http://healthmarketinnovations.org/blog/developing-countries-lead-way-mobile-health-technologies
Kremer, W. Hammond, C (2013) Abraham Maslow and the Pyramid that Beguiled Business. BBC News. Available at: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-23902918
Internet Medicine, Mobile Health Affects Africa in a Huge Way. Available at: http://internetmedicine.com/i-third-world/