Institute For The Future

Open Health and a health-related application for the iPhone

The innovation technology lab inSTEDD (Innovative Support to Emergencies Diseases and Disasters) has issued a call to developers willing to volunteer their time to build an SMS GeoChat application for the iPhone that emergency responders and aid workers will be able to communicate their exact location; message recipients will be able to view the sender’s location in Google Earth, Google Maps, Live Earth, etc.

This story caught my eye for two reasons. First, it is a great example of Open Health. The pre-Beta source code is available on inSTEDD's website to anyone who wants to take on the challenge. And as inSTEDD's mission statement concludes, "Through collaboration better answers can be found."

InSTEDD, a non-profit funded by Google.org and the Rockefeller Foundation, is based on open innovation:

 

InSTEDD works with universities, corporations, international health organizations, humanitarian NGOs and communities. Together, we work to identify or craft and then field test technologies for better data collection and analysis, more efficient communications, and more effective response. InSTEDD will, for example, be adapting new social networking capabilities for humanitarian coordination, and testing inflatable satellite dishes able to be carried in a backpack.

InSTEDD’s mission is to discover, develop, test, deploy and share information about technologies that buy critical time. (emphasis added)

 

Second, the mission statement also offers several other important observations:

 

Disease and disaster are usually viewed as separate topics,

handled by different agencies and specialists. But there is no humanitarian crisis that does not have a health component, or a serious outbreak of disease that does not have a humanitarian dimension.

According to a recent Oxfam report, there has been a four-fold increase in the annual number of natural disasters.

Increased trade and travel, high-volume livestock and poultry operations, a shifting climate and a burgeoning human population have also led to a disturbing global increase and spread of newly identified pathogens (HIV/AIDS, SARS, hantavirus), a resurgence of familiar plagues (TB, malaria, polio), and the emergence of deadly new strains (H5N1 avian influenza, West Nile virus, antibiotic-resistant staphylococcus).

Mortality statistics only begin to tell the story. The costs of a disease outbreak or a natural disaster are devastating for families, communities and countries. AIDS leaves children orphans. Floods, fires and earthquakes destroy homes. Disease outbreaks cripple food supplies and ruin livelihoods.

 

These realities are critical to our thinking about the global health economy, not only in terms of the public health issues, but also in the context of food, trade, and the environment.