Using only an inexpensive, basic cellphone, a farmer in rural India can get expert advice for his crops. Even better; a mother in a remote African village can use a quite ordinary cell phone to get help treating her sick child. These amazing things, and more are, possible because Tapan Parikh, an IT teacher and researcher in California, along with many colleagues and partners, has designed info sharing systems that rely only on speaking into a cell phone to convey information.
This is a wonderfully powerful and useful idea. It might seem sort of obvious, but it's really not. Text based services, that use words typed on a computer keyboard or a cell phone keypad, at this point seem pretty obvious. But if you try to do a Google search in a region where the internet isn't readily available (not to mention on an expensive computer using non-existent electricity), you're not going to find success. And now add in non-literacy you can see that the problem is profound.
We've seen voice based query systems popping up here, but so far they seem like sort of gimmicky cell phone tricks. "Where's the nearest pizza joint" kind of stuff. Taking that concept and polishing it into specific health and development tools for the developing world is empowering and huge.
Cell phone technology is still spreading into the developing world, but at an accelerating rate. It is relatively inexpensive and efficient to expand and becoming more so as the technology for remote communication continues to develop and mature. Planting a solar-powered telephone cell is an fast and inexpensive way to spread telecomm services in very remote areas. Cheap cell phones -- without all of the extra geegaws -- are, well, cheap and plentiful. Even with a camera, it's still cheap.
It's just great when technology really works for people -- when the design is adjusted to fit the way people behave instead of the other way around.
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