{{Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Rwanda’s recent graduate Vanessa Umutoni presented last week a research paper along with her adviser Suzana Brown, CMU scholar in residence, at the Global Conference on Health Care System Engineering in Istanbul, Turkey. }}

The paper, entitled “mHealth projects in developed and resource-limited settings”, details how mobile phones, and in particular smart phones, continue to acquire many functions that are becoming a preferred solution for numerous mHealth applications.

The paper was produced by a group of students from Carnegie Mellon University in Rwanda while taking a mHealth class that Suzana Brown taught in the fall of 2013.

The students found that mHealth applications in developed and developing countries address different problems, but the solutions are similar.

In order to organize the literature the class divided mHealth into four distinct areas: adherence to medication or treatment, monitoring and data collection, health education, and mobile phones as medical devices.

By conducting quantitative data analysis of a variety of mHealth projects worldwide, for the first three areas of mHealth the students determined that while in developed countries mHealth primarily makes use of smart phones that have internet access and sensors, in the developing world mHealth primarily makes use of feature phones that rely on SMS and GPRS.

However, mobile phones as medical devices are used similarly in both settings, and provide a low cost solution to diagnostics and access to medical equipment.

With the goal of “Enhancing competitiveness through healthcare systems engineering”, the Global Conference on Health Care System Engineering is organized by the Istanbul Technical University to showcase the most cutting edge research on health care systems and ran from August 5 – 8.

Presented by Rwanda’s Vanessa Umutoni, this is the first time that a student project from Carnegie Mellon University in Rwanda has been presented in an international forum.