Only an innovative approach can save lives of millions living in developing countries.
　　Of the more than 6 billion cell phone subscriptions worldwide, 76% are in developing countries. From the rural village of Pupa New Guinea to the bustling New York City, mobile phone network is surprisingly well covered. This rapid growth of mobile phone usage and its wide coverage has also radically transformed the way of delivering health care and saving lives to underserved populations in developing countries.
　　Cancer of the cervix uteri is the second most common cancer among women worldwide. About 86% of the cases occur in developing countries. Each year, more than 50,000 women die of cervical cancer in Africa, according to World Health Organization estimates, as more than 80% of the cases are detected in late stages.
　　In Tanzania, almost 4,500 women die annually from the caner due to a shortage of medical experts and a lack of quality screening services, particularly in rural areas. Screening programs are needed to reduce the mortality of cervical cancer.
　　A group of Canadian and Tanzanian health innovators have launched The Kilimanjaro Cervical Screening Project to reduce the potential mortality rates of cervical cancer. The project aims to apply simple and safe mobile technologies to lower the barriers of large-scale screening and Papanicolaou test in the developing world.
　　The idea is to send teams of two trained non-physician healthcare workers in remote Tanzania to examine women living several hours away from health centers. The nurses, who will be equipped with cervical screening and treatment tools as well as standard smartphones, will take a photograph of the cervix with their phone and send it via SMS to a medical expert in a specialized clinic. Trained doctors will then be able to review the image immediately and text the diagnosis back to the health worker, as well as give instructions about treatment.
　　“We believe this method has the potential to save the lives of thousands of women residing in the poorest areas of the world,” says Dr Karen Yeates, of Queen's University, Ontario, the principal investigator of the The Kilimanjaro Cervical Screening Project
　　Nadim Mahmud, a co-founder of Medic Mobile, is another innovator in the hope of applying simple SMS-based platforms to build a new model of health care support network to improve the health of under-served and disconnected communities.
　　Medic Mobile works with partner organizations and guides them to use free, open source software and low cost tools to provide health services, to contain disease outbreaks and to boost immunization rate thought sending medication adherence reminders, tracking community immunization and dispatching mass announcements detailing satellite clinic schedules and locations. 　　For example, Medic Mobile worked with TIKA Center, a local immunization center in Kurnool, India to design a mobile-based reminder system for parents. Local health workers in the clinic enrolled newly pregnant women and took down their cell phone number. Once the system was updated with an infant's birth date, it would automatically schedule SMS reminders to be sent to the family when it was time for a vaccination. The system also sent periodic educational messages about the importance of complete immunization and the diseases they protected against. After six months of piloting this intervention, dramatic improvements in vaccination rates have been seen.
　　To conclude, mobile health care innovations are more likely developed in developed countries like Canada and the USA and will likely be deployed to developing countries. But many SMS-based health care innovations might eventually return to the developed world as cost-effective methods of addressing fundamental problems in our overburdened health care system.
　　在全球范围内有超过6亿的手机用户，76%的用户在发展中国家。手机使用的快速增长和其广泛的覆盖率，从根本上改变了发展中国家提供卫生保健的方式。凯伦-耶茨和纳迪姆分别利用了手机科技带来的方便， 改善了发展中国家的贫困人口的医疗问题。并希望能利用这些移动医疗创新技术来降低发达国家的医疗成本和为发达国家的医疗系统减低压力。