We are currently really interested in the variety of mobile use options presented by near filed communication (NFC), which allows devices to seamlessly and intuitively communicate with one another, enabling an easy, convenient user experience.
NFC is basically a set of short-range wireless technologies, typically requiring a distance of 10 cm or less, the technology always involves an initiator and a target and can take very simple form factors such as tags, stickers, key fobs, or cards that do not require batteries. NFC peer-to-peer communication is also possible, where both devices are powered. NFC tags currently contain anything from simple data to elaborate instructions that enable them to unlock doors, pay for goods, launch phone calls or exchange data between users. The below (4 year old) video from MIT gives a good idea of some of the possible uses.
NFC is already available on a number of phones and will be on all mobiles within a few years (kinda like the ‘new GPS’). The technology opens up amazing new possibilities for health and development programmes/approaches, both from a professional and individual user perspective. We want to map to these out and help the development/health community be at the forefront of this technology, as it rolls out!
Today the World Health Assembly passed a resolution on strengthening national health emergency, disaster management capacities and the resilience of health systems. A big congratulation to all partners who have been working on this, particularly WHO’s South-East Asia emergency response team!
The resolution has been one of the objectives of the safe hospitals campaign we designed for WHO. Another objective is to engage 100,000 people in this issue, we’re hence very pleased that 220,400 people have so far reacted for safe hospitals through the campaign’s Facebook ‘fast reaction’ application. This is to our knowledge the most successful WHO awareness raising campaign to date. Thank you also to our partner Taivas!! A happy day.
One of the fastest men in the world, Lotus team Formula 1 driver Heikki Kovalainen, has become the first champion to join WHO’s campaign (designed by us!) and challenge the public to beat his reaction time. ”I feel that this is a meaningful and effective way to help ensure hospitals and health facilities continue to treat and support people in all kinds of emergencies. I’m honoured to launch the challenge and help in raising awareness of safe hospitals in South-East Asia.”
+71,000 people have reacted to the challenge and new celebrity champions will be joining the campaign in a few weeks time. M4ID is also currently designing a map which will enable hospital administrators to list and the public to see what actions have been taken to make hospitals safe. For more about the issue and the reaction test go to the campaign site.
A new M4ID-designed Facebook and SMS communications initiative, Mama: Together for Safe Births in Crises, was launched today in New York by the Women’s Refugee Commission. The project addresses an important information gap for maternal health workers in emergencies, as identified by WRC research.
Through Mama, health workers are now able to identify themselves as maternal health champions within humanitarian organizations or in the field and to join a community of practice. Maternal health practitioners will, though five innovative applications, be able to seek advice from fellow members, share best practices and lessons learned, assess their own practices/skills level and test their knowledge of the MISP (minimal initial service package). Mama also offers rewards through digital badges for actions taken as well as a ‘Lives Saved Counter’ application through which the community can register when they enabled a safe birth, showing the positive impact of their work.
Mama is also an unprecedented initiative as it addresses the isolation faced by many health workers in the field through the use of new technology. For the first time, practitioners who may not have access to the Internet or smart phones will be able to send their questions/comments about maternal health to the Facebook community via SMS. This text message is posted to the Mama wall and member news feeds through a Facebook application. The other community members can reply to the question and the answer is sent as a text message back to the practitioner. The answer is filtered by the community and has to be recommended (”liked”) by three members before it is sent.
The project also involves expert Mama Mentors who provide advice, technical updates and answer specific questions. The community will focus on different technical/programmatic themes each month and new mentors will be invited to join in and support discussions.
We are very proud of this innovative project and look forward to providing continued support to Mama and WRC!
The anniversary seminar of the non-profit organisation Crisis Management Initiative (CMI) chaired by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Ahtisaari took place yesterday at the Finnish National Theatre. M4ID and MA course students from Aalto University joined NGOs, business leaders, politicians and Former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan in discussing peace mediation and the work of CMI. The seminar was the first of many events taking place during the ‘Ahtisaari Days’, which are aimed at making Finnish mediation work more widely known, with a particular emphasis on the importance of education, information and communications.
We were very pleased to have had the chance to present two new conflict resolution/peace mediation concepts at the event. One concept, the ‘Peace Pack’, enables the collection/management/archiving of uniting stories (through social media/mobiles).. the other concept is designed to visualize the peace process and supporting activities, focusing on positive/agreed on issues. We’ll post packages of both here soon. Below are some rather fuzzy photos of the presentation!
We’re excited that our global immunization information concept has been short listed by the Innovation Working Group (IWG) under the UN Secretary General’s implementation of the Global Strategy for Women’s and Children’s Health. The social media and mobile driven advocacy concept is one of 50 great projects, of which 10-15 will be presented and discussed in Norway end of April. Hopefully our idea will be among these finalists.
M4ID has been supporting WHO South-East Asia in a regional campaign to raise public awareness and push governments to take concrete actions in making hospitals safe from disasters. In brief this means building them to withstand natural disasters, having emergency plans in place, training staff to respond and continue to provide services post-disaster. We built a reaction tester on Facebook and have some 60,000 supporters, in addition to high-profile champions like Jet Li. The public show of support has been used by WHO at various regional Ministerial meetings and in country to get decision-makers on board, and several countries have taken action as a result (Nepal, Indonesia, India, Bhutan). We also look to have a World Health Assembly resolution on this in May, which is very exciting.
The next phase is now focused on gaining greater awareness/support and also pushing hospitals to stand up and say what they have done to make their hospital safe from disasters.. we are hence building a Google maps component where hospitals can be recorded and can list their actions, as well as a game-oriented application on Facebook through which people are sensitized to the issue and can check out their hospital etc, the game will enable the supporter to compete against public personas known for their speed (the theme of the campaign continues to be ‘disasters strike in seconds, WHO needs you to react fast). We look to launch this next phase in late April.
We’ve finalized the design stage of our Women’s Refugee Commission (WRC) project. The overall goal of the project is to improve maternal health care in humanitarian settings through changing the behaviour of health practitioners. To support that, we’re building a professional community of practice and tools provided that will help members prioritize and adopt key maternal health interventions at the field level.
Guided by WRC’s research, we’ve used mobile and Facebook as the key platforms. We’ve designed a range of applications to support the community, among others:
A ’share your practices’ survey application to capture and enable monitoring of skills/practices
A ‘lives saved counter’ to show the impact of the collective (as many work in isolation and do not feel their work is recognized) and to monitor clinical interventions used in the field
A multimedia ‘best practices and lessons learnt’ application to share and build the knowledge of the community
A mobile SMS ’stay in touch’ application, and
A rewarding system for activities undertaken by the community
Can’t wait for the launch and for the tools to be put use!
Tomorrow we start a new MA course over at Aalto University exploring new media concepts for conflict resolution. The course, called ‘Crisis Management and Interactive Dialogue Environments’, is a continuation of the successful collaboration between WHO, M4ID and Aalto, which resulted in 3 new social media prototypes for WHO’s Health Action in Crises. Read more about those here.
The 2011 study project partner is the Crisis Management Initiative (CMI), a non-profit organization headed by Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Martti Ahtisaari. CMI works to resolve conflict and to build sustainable peace internationally. The organization is now seeking to utilize more new media and social media tools in their work. The solutions resulting from the course will most likely be in the area of new media tools supporting multi-stakeholder dialogue in conflict environments, systems and processes utilizing audio-visual communications, data-visualization techniques or social media applications. Will post about progress, and you can also follow the course blog if interested in this area.
M4ID is thrilled to, together with our partner Family, be designing a new global maternal health focused campaign for the Women’s Refugee Commission. The aim of the campaign is to engage and support a community of experts working on maternal health issues in humanitarian settings. Building on extensive research, we’re developing a REEAN (reach, entice, engage, activate, nurture) communications strategy, the overall campaign creative and the social media/mobile tools to support the members. The development of the tools are especially exciting, as the brief allows us to really innovate and bring together different channels to best serve people working in very difficult, diverse environments. Here’s a picture of part of the team at work!
