[1990-2008] LAC and OECD’s PCs and Mobile subscriptions through the light of the moving bubbles

I am a big fan of Swedish professor Hans Rosling and his work at the Gapminder Foundation, fighting against what he calls the most chronic disorder reported: DbHd (data base hugging disorder). Prof. Hans is noted for his groundbreaking work with compiling and transforming development data into moving bubble diagrams and flowing curves that make global trends clear. Indeed as he usually says in his talks: Power Pointer presentations look like stuffed animals when you compare them with live interactive graphs and maps.

I recently started playing with Google Motion chart to visualize ICT trends and dynamics over time. There are plenty people mastering this king of graph and creating very interesting visualizations and mash-ups. If you are not familiar with this work, I highly recommend that you have a look at the Google Charts Tools, in particular the motion chart. It's a dynamic chart to explore several indicators over time. The chart is rendered within the browser using Flash.

So, here is the final product.

Overall, the following interactive graph shows LAC countries' performance lagging behind OECD countries regarding Personal Computers (PCs) per 100 inhabitants, while Mobile Telephone Subscriptions really took off in the region and grew from 9.9 to 81.6 from 2000 to 2008, respectively.

Notes: Mexico is included in LAC and not in OECD. Countries are coded as OECD regardless of when they became OECD members (i.e., the Slovak Republic joined the OECD in December 2000, but the country is coded as OECD from 1990-2008).

Sources: Prepared by the IDB's Science and Technology Division based on the data from ITU Statistics online database and World Telecommunication / ICT Indicators Database 2009.

Reference: The Imperative of Innovation: Creating Prosperity in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC)

You can find some more visualizations such as this one, using World Bank's Open Data and on the Gapminder website.

Now, if you are wondering how to extract the data from a Microsoft Excel (tm) spreadsheet and translate it into a Motion Chart, here's a tip: you can use an excellent Python package called xlrd, which works on any platform (including Mac!) and allows you to programmatically make these transformations (too boring and time-consuming to do it by hand). Note that this is a library target to software developer and it is not an end-user tool. I will discuss this in more detail in a future post. The source code looks like this - note that the code snippet is not complete.

import xlrd # Import the package
    
book = xlrd.open_workbook("yourfile.xls") # Open an .xls file

sheet = book.sheet_by_index(0) # Get the first sheet

regs = sheet.nrows

while rowNumber <= MAX_NUM_YEARS:      

 currentYear = str(sheet.cell_value(rowx=rowNumber, colx=2))      
 
 for counter in range(regs):              
  country = sheet.cell_value(rowx=counter, colx=0)         
  year = str(sheet.cell_value(rowx=counter, colx=2))         
  pcs = str(sheet.cell_value(rowx=counter, colx=5))         
  mobiles = str(sheet.cell_value(rowx=counter, colx=6))         
  region = sheet.cell_value(rowx=counter, colx=1)                  

  if (year == currentYear):             
   print "['",country.rstrip(),"'",             
   print ",new Date (",year,             
   print ",0,1)",             
   print ",",pcs,             
   print ",",mobiles,             
   print ",'",region.rstrip(),"'],"          

  elif (year == "NEXT"):             
   rowNumber += 1             
   break                       

Acknowledgement and thanks:
Alison Cathles (Research Fellow at the IDB's Science and Technology Division)

Mobilizing Reproductive Health: How Cell Phones Are Revolutionizing Women’s Health

I am thrilled to participate in the panel on How Cell Phones Are Revolutionizing Women’s Health @womendeliver Conference next Wednesday June 9, 1:30-3:00pm. The session is organized by the mHealth Alliance, launched in 2009 by the Rockefeller, UN and Vodafone Foundations to facilitate cross-sector collaboration to bring mHealth to sustainable scale.

Maternal mortality remains a major challenge to health systems worldwide.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), every minute, at least one woman died from complications related to pregnancy and childbirth, about 585,000 women each year. To make matters worse, for every woman who dies in childbirth, 20 more suffer injuries, infection or disease (about 10 million women each year). And 4 million babies die before they are 30 days old. Millions more die from diseases such as malaria that has largely been eradicated in the developed world.

The following [interactive] map shows the huge number of maternal deaths in Latin American and the Caribbean (LAC) countries. Although Chile is better placed than the other countries in the region, appearing as 46th in the global league table, 21.1 women die for every 100,000 live births. In the case of Haiti, the worst performer in the region and 155th (out 181) in the MMR global rank (numbers before the earthquake), the report shows 582.5 deaths for every 100,000 live births.

Maternal mortality ratio (MMR) - the number of maternal deaths per 100,000 live births - in the LAC countries.

DATA: download the full datasheet

Source: Maternal mortality for 181 countries, 1980-2008: a systematic analysis of progress towards Millennium Development Goal 5.

Why is there so high maternal mortality?

• Poor access to the health care system
• Access to family planning - counseling, services, supplies
• Low coverage of antenatal care (e.g. missing appointments)
• Inability or difficulties to communicate with providers and health-care team in case of emergencies and when needed
• No access to lab results
• No health care-related information easily available

The Promise of information and communications technologies (ICT) for Health: a paradigm shift towards digital health care

Modern information and communication technology (ICT) has a pivotal role to play in tackling health-related problems, by empowering individuals and equipping decision makers with timely information about critical health issues. It can, among other things, enable healthcare workers to conduct remote consultation and diagnosis, store and disseminate healthcare information, improve access to and use of information by patient, strengthen epidemiological surveillance and management, establish databases to track vaccination, raise awareness through knowledge sharing, improve quality of health services provision, improve patient compliance with treatment regimen, improve access to health services, expand access to ongoing medical education and training for health workers.

In the fight against maternal mortality, ICT can critically reduce the incidence of maternal death numbers by: facilitating access to information and healthcare services, and reaching women with information to prevent unnecessary deaths and complications.

Also, with the expansion of wireless networks, mobile technology became an important ally. It’s the most rapidly adopted technology in history and represents an exciting opportunity to “reach the unreached”.

According to ITU (International Telecommunications Union), mobile subscriptions globally will surpass the 5 billion mark by the end of 2010, two-thirds of which are in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) – the total number of PCs in use worldwide including laptops is 1 billion.

Almost 90% of the LAC population has a cell phone. Some forecasts indicate that it could grow by 8.2% annually in the region in 2010. Cell phones have become firmly ensconced as essential goods rather than luxury items.

There is a growing body of evidence that demonstrates the potential of mobile communications to radically improve healthcare services — even in some of the most remote and resource-poor environments. The key applications for mHealth (defined as the use of mobile communications for health services and information) in developing countries are:

• Education and awareness
• Remote data collection
• Remote monitoring
• Communication and training for healthcare workers
• Disease and epidemic outbreak tracking
• Diagnostic and treatment support
• Appointment reminders (to patients and workers)

To sum up, ICT by itself certainly play a key role in helping saving lives but it isn't a silver bullet. Health system strengthening as a whole is the key to the success of any kind of eHealth/mHealth intervention.

ICTs are only as useful as the substantive requirements and expertise on which they are based. We need clinical and public health workers and community to determine the needs and challenges they face; then gather the ICT experts to find the points of intersection -- where ICT can help along the continuum of care for pregnant mothers and newborn children, and for those with serious diseases.

References:

[1] "mHealth for Development: The Opportunity of Mobile Technology for Healthcare in the Developing World". United Nations Foundation/Vodafone Foundation Technology Partnership (2009); www.unfoundation.org/technology

[2] "Innovation: Applying Knowledge in Development". Authors: Lee Yee-Cheong, Calestous Juma, Jeffrey D. Sachs; UN Millennium Project 2005, Task Force on Science, Technology, and Innovation.

[3] "Focus on Five: Improving Women's Health to Achieve the MDGs". Author: Women Deliver No. of pages: 22. Publication date: 2009.

[4] "Barriers and Gaps affecting mHealth in Low and Middle Income Countries: Policy White Paper". Authors: Mechael, Patricia N., Batavina H., Kaonga N., Searle S., Kwan A., Goldberger A., Fu L., Ossman J. May 2010. The Center for Global Health and Economic Development (CGHED), Earth Institute at Columbia University and mHealth Alliance.

[5] "Mobile Technology for Community Health (MoTeCH): mHealth Ethnography Report". Author: Mechael, Patricia N.; Dodowa Health Research Center. The Grameen Foundation.

Leveraging ICT potential for Latin America’s poor

I borrowed the title from an interview I gave back in January.

Revisiting the data, the new studies show that Mobile data usage in Latin America, like mobile usage everywhere, is growing steadily and fast.

Cell phones have become firmly ensconced as essential goods rather than luxury items.

With mobile subscriptions having overtaken fixed lines as the preferred method of communication, mobile subscriptions penetration totals 89% of the population. Mobile subscriptions are forecast to grow by 8.2% annually in 2010, slightly below the 10.9% registered in 2009 but still strong growth. This is part of the stabilization of the market.

Also, 20% of mobile services revenue came from data in 2009. The region has entered a stage when data services are essential to the whole mobile business model (source: Pyramid Research).

Broadband penetration in Latin America is about 27% below the world average. This slow uptake has been largely due to the high prices charged by providers, which often have a virtual monopoly in their areas of operation. Countries that lead broadband penetration in Latin America are Chile (9.8 percent), Argentina (9.3 percent) and Brazil (5.8 percent). (Sources: IDC/Cisco; ITU; OECD).

Father of the Cell Phone Talks About His Child's Future

Today nearly two-thirds of the worldwide population has a cell phone (4.6 billion devices). And these numbers keep growing. In the Latin American and the Caribbean region, almost 90%, which is close to the world average. In South and Central America, the highest mobile penetration rates can be found in Venezuela, Uruguay, Argentina, El Salvador, Suriname, and Panama, which have all passed the 100% milestone (BuddeComm).

In this video, the father of the cell phone Marty Cooper who made the first public cell phone call in the sidewalks of New York in 1973, talks about — among other topics — the story of this invention, privacy, mobile health, sensors, and wearable cell phones. He is convinced that cell phone in its 37 is still on your infancy and that engineers tend to get enchanted by technology and neglect to consider consumer needs and behaviors.

As mentioned by Cooper and proved with numbers, the $153 billion wireless industry has its eye on mobilizing one industry in particular: Healthcare. According to one estimate, the healthcare industry will spend about $2.5 billion on wireless applications and services over the next few years (MobileHealthNews.com).

Over these 37 years, mobile technology has been traditionally offered voice calls and more recently, text message and Internet to connect people. Now, with improving capabilities, cheaper/flat rates and affordable handheld devices, it is undoubtedly a domain that provides a powerful space for innovation and new services.

Feel free to drop a line with your thoughts about the transformative power of cell phones and its potential impact on real world challenges.




Watch CBS News Videos Online

The Cell Phone: Marty Cooper's Big Idea
Hear the story of the invention of the cell phone from the man whose team came up with it at Motorola. The inventor, Martin Cooper, is still at it, improving the gadget he came up.