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What Ebola Is Teaching Us About Hard Trends

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WIRED     Essay by David Burris                                                                                        Dec. 14, 2014

...Deadly and infectious viruses such as Ebola are an inevitable and unavoidable fact of nature. In other words, they are examples of a Hard Trend. And they demand new innovations in order to combat them.

...the deadly force of Ebola is the kind of imminent threat that inspires human minds to new heights. It teaches us that Hard Trends come at us fast and provide the catalyst to overcome inertia and bring about technological innovations.

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Communication is key to mobilizing populations in countries affected by Ebola. In order to treat the sick and prevent the spread of the disease, healthcare workers need to be able to coordinate with people on the frontline and know where to send supplies. At the moment, telecommunications technologies are not keeping pace with the intense demands that Ebola creates.

In Ebola-affected countries, like Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone....the telecommunications networks are currently weak. For example, in Liberia the 3G and 4G networks are very thin outside of the capital city of Monrovia, and it’s hard for citizens to access electricity to power internet-capable mobile devices. U-report is a solution that uses simple mobile phones in West Africa to connect health workers to the government and hundreds of thousands of young people to key information and services using basic voice and SMS services.

The innovator who creates an internet-capable smartphone device that’s as affordable and simple-to-use as an SMS-capable phone will be at the forefront of helping to ease communication problems in Ebola-affected regions — and the rest of the world will benefit from the solution too.

Big data analytics is currently helping to draw detailed maps of population movements in Ebola-affected countries by gathering information collected from mobile phones. ...Nevertheless, data collected from mobile phones can only give a partial picture. Big data analysts recognize that they need to bring together information from multiple other sources and mine those sources to find patterns.

Read complete article.

http://www.wired.com/2014/12/ebola-hard-trends/

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Supporting documentation for the article above is within the links below . . .

UNICEF - U-report
http://unicefstories.org/2014/11/13/how-cell-phones-could-help-liberia-win-the-fight-against-ebola/

U-report
http://ureport.in/

U-report - Liberia
http://liberia.ureport.in/

U-report - Sierra Leone
http://sierraleone.ureport.in/

THE LANCET by James O'Donovan and Amalia Bersin

Owing to the high penetration of mobile phone subscriptions in Guinea (63/100 people), Liberia (60/100 people), and Sierra Leone (44/100 people), mHealth strategies could be a low-cost, high-impact solution to mapping outbreaks and providing education.

The technology company IBM launched a disease-mapping system in October, 2014. Collaboration between Sierra Leone's largest mobile provider, AirTel, and IBM allows local people to send free text messages about Ebola to the Government. Heat-maps that link emerging issues to location information can then be created. Large data analysis has been used in the past to great effect. Tracking population movements via mobile phone proved highly successful after the 2012 earthquake in Haiti, helping to map the spread of cholera...

mHealth strategies also have the potential to be used as an educational tool for behaviour change. In Sierra Leone, the Red Cross has worked in collaboration with Airtel to launch a platform that sends informative text messages to people in the most affected areas...
 
Finally, mHealth as an educational tool is not limited to the general public. .. UNICEF and Intrahealth International have partnered with Liberia's Ministry of Health and Social Welfare to provide health-care workers with reference and training materials that can be downloaded onto their phones...
 
mHealth strategies do, however, have their limitations. As a relatively new concept, their effectiveness is not fully known. Further, mobile phone coverage is not universal, especially in Sierra Leone.

Read full article
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-109X%2814%2970357-2/fulltext

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