Yesterday, I announced the publication of a new in-depth case study on our knowledge community Living the Path focusing on Text4Baby, a new U.S. initiative designed to improve infant and maternal health.  In that post, I mentioned that the developers of Text4Baby were following in the footsteps of initiatives launched in other parts of the world such as India and Africa that use mobile technologies to change health behaviors.

Well, this morning, our friends at MobileActive.org published a case study on an initiative based in Ghana focusing  on maternal health that has direct relevance to the Text4Baby initiative. It is called Mobile Technology for Community Health (MoTeCH).  According to MobileActive.org, MoTech “is working to determine how best to use mobile phones to increase the quality and quantity of antenatal and neonatal care in rural Ghana.”(MobileActive.org partnered with the Path of the Blue Eye Project to develop a series of articles focusing on how to use mobile technologies to communicate about health and wellness effectively.)

MobileActive.org’s continues its discussion of MoTeEH, saying: “a woman might come in for a health check-up when she’s 12 or 14 weeks pregnant, at which point she would be registered into the MoTeCH system. She would then be on track to receive two kinds of messages: informative texts and action texts. The informative texts simply tell the parents what to expect (i.e., developmental stages) during a pregnancy, while the action texts encourage parents to make clinic visits based on their personal histories (such as needs for shots or follow-up appointments).”

The MoTeCH initiative is very interesting and provides a great opportunity to compare and contrast this effort with Text4Baby.  If you are aware of other maternal health educational initiatives using mobile technologies taking place around the world, please leave a comment below.

Read More from Walking the Path:

1. Mothers, Behavior Change and Mobile: Taking a Closer Look at the Text4Baby Initiative
2. Grandma’s a Teenager: The Importance of Digital Age
3. On the Digital Divide: Why Improving Access is NOT Enough