Develop Mobile App for Health win 50K with mHealth Alliance Award

New mHealth Alliance Award to Spur Innovation in Wireless Solutions to Global Health Challenges

Mobile phone are useful communication tools, you can use your phone to call you wife to let her know you will not get home in time so that your dinner will not end up in the dog. Your wife on the other hand could call you on your mobile to remind you that little Charlie has run out of nappies. For the show-offs, you can bore other traveller in the quiet train carriage about that skiing holiday in Switzerland you just got back from.

Contrast some of the uses we put mobile phone to in the UK with what people in the developing world use it for; farmers in remote rural location in Africa use it to receive vital weather updates, peasants in far flung corners of the world use it for banking and trading. All over the developing world, mobile phones are used for crucial things, some of them literally a matter of life and death.

The technology and infrastructure for mobile communication and mobile phone handset itself is now widespread in the developing countries, application that run on the mobile phone to help developing communities do even more important things are few and far between, that is why a consortium of organisations lead by Vodafone Americas Foundation and the mHealth Alliance come together to create and award called mHealth Alliance Award.
The award encourages mobile phone application developers to come up with solutions to help solve some of the healthcare issues in developing countries or to quote the organisers of the award “ The award will be granted to the developer of an innovative wireless technology with the most potential to address critical health challenges, especially in developing regions.

David Aylward, Executive Director of the mHealth Alliance, pointing out the wide reach of mobile in developing world he said ”
“In places where roads remain unpaved, and where basic infrastructure such as clean water and electricity are scant, mobile phones already have become an empowering force for millions,” David Aylward then trows the challenge to application developers “The mHealth Alliance Award challenges innovators and social entrepreneurs to use mobile technology to advance health delivery in even the most remote environments, such as through improved diagnosis, treatment or access to information.”

If you are a mobile application developer, this is you chance to develop an application that could save lives. If you application is original and really useful, not only could you win $50,000 but you could win an awful lot more, here is the full detail of what the person or organisation that create the winning application could expect:

The winner of the mHealth Alliance Award will receive a cash prize and benefits totalling $50,000, including participation in Santa Clara University’s Center for Science, Technology, and Society’s Global Social Benefit Incubator Program (GSBI™). In addition, the winner will receive strategic and networking assistance from the mHealth Alliance, an umbrella group founded by the Rockefeller Foundation, United Nations Foundation and Vodafone Foundation that supports cross-sector collaboration in delivering health care to the furthest reaches of wireless communications.

If I was a mobile application developer, I will put away the half finished iPod game I am working on for this worth wile mobile application competition.

You can find more information about this project at Project Vodafone.

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