The future of medicine? Cellphones

David Silverman/Getty Images

Tono, a rural village in Japan that lacks an obstetrician, has adopted a creative strategy for helping pregnant women: using cellphones to transmit real-time data to doctors some 40 miles away. When the doctors determine that the woman is ready to deliver, the woman leaves for the nearest city with a maternity ward. But cellphones aren't just helping high-tech Japan with its critical shortage of obstetricians, they're also set to fundamentally transform medical access in the developing world.

In February, the U.S. government and a number of companies in the mobile phone industry launched Phones-for-Health, a $10 million initiative to improve health systems in the developing world. The public-private partnership aims to harness the impressive cellphone penetration rates in developing countries to bolster health initiatives. Health workers in the field will carry cellphones containing an application that lets them enter health data on patients, which they then send to a central database. There, it can be analyzed and mapped by the system and made immediately available to health officials on the Internet. As Paul Meyer, chairman of Voxiva, the company that has designed the underlying software, explains,

Health workers will also be able to use the system to order medicine, send alerts, download treatment guidelines, training materials and access other appropriate information ... Managers at the regional and national level can access information in real-time via a Web-based database."

Eventually, cellphones could even be used to store individuals' medical records, including x-rays and 3-D medical scan graphics. This technology is just coming to the United States, but hopefully it will only be a matter of time before people in poorer areas can use it to access, record and clarify their own medical histories where hospitals and clinics do not.