Using NFC-enabled mobile phones for public health in developing countries

Abstract

One of the largest IT challenges in the health and medical fields is the ability to track large numbers of patients and materials. As mobile phone availability becomes ubiquitous around the world, the use of Near Field Communication (NFC) with mobile phones is emerging as a promising solution to this challenge. The decreasing price and increasing availability of mobile phones and NFC allows us to to apply these technologies to developing countries in order to overcome patient identification and disease surveillance limitations, and permit improvements in data quality, patient referral, and emergency response. In this paper, we present a system using NFC-enabled mobile phones for facilitating the tracking and care of patients in a low-resource environment. While our system design has been inspired by the needs of an ongoing project in Karachi, Pakistan, we believe that it is easily generalizable and applicable for similar health and medical projects in other places where mobile service is available.