A young Karen woman from Burma living in a refugee camp in Thailand is worried about her baby who has severe diarrhea. She sends an SMS with a question about his symptoms and her location to the Handheld Health shortcode. This information is posted onto an online map where community health specialists are chatting about potential response scenarios when they receive an alert that this young woman is not alone. Many of her immediate neighbors have been querying the system about similar symptoms and the trend points to a potential cholera outbreak in the camp. The admins send a message to a Windows Mobile smartphone of a local health worker who can pull up detailed information about how to effectively isolate and control the problem.

Handheld Health gives health professionals working with vulnerable communities an array of tools to better monitor health conditions in their area, visualize geographic health data, communicate with each other and present community health data to 3rd parties. This system can be used as a way to monitor general health trends or to help track the progress of specific initiatives in a given area. It also gives health and disease-prevention information to those who are most in need and most at risk by empowering the community itself with the technology that they already have.

We aim to launch the project around the borders of Burma where we have an extensive network of local contacts and partners. Inside Burma a repressive military government has sent the health system into ruin with disastrous economic policies and widespread neglect of social services and infrastructure. The result is one of the world's most vulnerable populations to infectious diseases, many of them, such as malaria, are easily preventable. Especially vulnerable are the ethnic minority groups that live along Burma's remote mountainous border regions and travel to neighboring countries for treatment. Having won the Netsquared UC Berkeley Human Rights Challenge with our Handheld Human Rights project, we are currently in the process of placing portals in the border countries.

Our Global Partnership for Development model means working with local programmers in the community to develop tools according to the community's needs. With the Microsoft OS being ubiquitous in the region, we have been providing support for education in website development, systems administration, and programming in Java, C++, .NET, etc. We see a large opportunity for expanding this education by creating new programs using the Windows Mobile SDK by inspiring local innovations. [enable the emergence of local software industries, such as young people who have the skills to be able to write their own applications for their own community] This education and the continuing development of our project allows us to tackle goals 4,5,6 by confronting the health problems that curtail this type of progress. In addition it provides additional opportunities for supporting Goal 2 as communities realize the impact that computer literacy can have in primary and continuing education.

The following is the functionality we're looking to include in multiple languages:

Concerned individuals:
•      Send SMS
o      ? Questions
o      ! Emergencies
•      Receive
o      ? Automated Answer
o      ! Specialist Responds
Healthcare Specialists
•      Map-based Chat
o      For coordinating emergency response
o      Using GeoChat sync
•      Surveys
o      For field documentation
o      Using FrontlineSMS Forms
•      Trends
o      For early detection and response
o      Using keyword/keyphrase pair algorithms
•      Incident Report
o      For documentation with photo/video/text/location etc
o      Using Ushahidi for KML generation
•      Supply Chain
o      For inventory management
o      Using FrontlineSMS Forms
•      Secure Transfer
o      For important, but private information uploading/texting/etc
o      Using CryptoSMS & Tor