Bill Gates. founder Microsoft said that the mobile technology can help improve global health with cheap diagnostic tools, patient reminders and making immunization programs more efficient.
Bill Gates, in his keynote address at the mHealth Summit at Washington, where people from public and private sector groups and companies involved in mobile technology and health gathered, said:”The mobile phone is pretty interesting for lots of things.”
Mobile Technology to Help Improve Global Health: Bill Gates stepped down from day-to-day duties at Microsoft 2 years ago to concentrate on global health care through the ‘Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’. He expressed his views on mobile technology, saying, “There’s a whole lot of opportunities. I think we have to approach these things with some humility though,” Gates also pointed out that “there’s no Internet and data connections” in much of the world. “I do think there’s absolutely a role (for mobile technology to impact global health) but I think we have to hold ourselves to some pretty tough metrics to see if it’s really making a difference or not.” Gates said the mobile phone can allow health care professionals to “actually be there with a patient, to be there in a clinic which might not be staffed with wholly trained doctors.” He added that, “When I think about the biggest impacts I think of patient reminders. You could get people to take medicines regularly, that’s a huge one.”
Mobile Technology to Improve Immunization Programs: Gates said mobile technology could also help improve immunization programs. “If you could register every birth on a cellphone, get fingerprints, get a location, then you could take these systems where you go around and make sure the immunization happens, you could run that in a more effective way. You could get a huge improvement if you just take the vaccines we have today and get those delivered.”
Robots – Future of Technology and Health-care: Regarding the future of this technology and health, Bill Gates said, “If you just want to pick one thing it’s got to be robots. When we look at something like maternal mortality there’s a certain level you can’t go below if you can’t do C-section. Doing a C-section requires a sterile environment, a certain expertise and yet in some ways it’s very routine. If you can have a robot that can do that, that’s fairly inexpensive, that’s a great thing. Computers have gone from just sitting there. The computer, it’s learning to see, it’s learning to talk, it’s learning to listen. And it’s also learning to move around.” He said a robot, for example, could eventually be developed that could lift and carry a patient. “Humans are surprisingly good at this,” he said. “That’s a hard thing for a robot. But once a robot can do it, it doesn’t forget how to do it and it can do it 24 hours a day.”
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