SOURCE:  Business Daily

Mganga is a mobile phone application that was developed by Kenyan PhD student Shikoh Gitau and won her the Google Anita Borg award last year.

The mobile health application that will record, catalogue and map out traditional medicine and knowledge is among the over 200 million m-health platforms in use today.

Mobile phone apps are expected to increase threefold by 2012, according to a recent report from Pyramid Research.

The report ‘Health Check: Key Players in Mobile Healthcare’ says these applications will spur innovation in healthcare delivery and is becoming a new revenue stream for telecoms companies in the developed world.

“Healthcare solutions that are delivered via mobile technology are creating a new frontier of innovation that is driving down costs, increasing access, and improving quality of care,” said Denis Culver, analyst and author of the report.

These applications are mainly designed to help people stay healthy, support patients living with certain diseases, increase health literacy, manage medical information and support compliance.

In the developed world, people pay for the apps to help manage their various health ailments such as diabetes.

However, in Africa the technology is mainly on designing healthcare products or data collection applications to support healthcare.

Personal Digital Assistant (PDAs) for health data collection is the earliest technology intervention in Africa and is still being used along with smart phones.

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