Design
5.2. Text to Number – Concept Regarding the investigation and the environment of mHealth in developing countries, in particular the lack of standardized communication and networks, which connect all stakeholders, it builds a challenge but at the same time contains market potential. Therefore, this framework was set up, to provide a brief and basic description of the key elements a business model in this field could have and how it should be built.
Figure 18: Networking the World Community With Health Care Delivery. Own Elaboration. (2012).
The idea is to create a service, which can be accessed by almost everyone with a cell phone. Thus, SMS was chosen to be the main channel of communication. Further, SMS does not have vast data capacities, as for a system needs to be designed, which can decode and encode text respectively any kind of data into a shorter, machine-readable language – namely numbers. The initial impetus for this concept was derived from the exploration of humanitarian disasters in the past. In such an event, immense masses of data occur within very short time and lead to overburdened provider networks. Besides, those amounts of data cannot be qualified due to the lack of resources and the inability of machines to read individual constellations of data. A standardized SMS code would lift that problem.
63