Mobile health project award for Hertford student

11 April 2013

Marco Haenssgen, DPhil student at Hertford College, is co-investigator on an interdisciplinary pilot project on mobile technologies and health in China and India which has just been awarded £28k by the John Fell Oxford University Press (OUP) Research Fund. Marco will work on the 20-month project with Dr Proochista Ariana (principal investigator), Professor Xiaolan Fu, Dr Felix Reed-Tsochas, and Dr Gari Clifford.

The project responds to the increasing interest in mobile health technologies (“mhealth”). It investigates forms of mobile phone use and their implications for healthcare access among rural populations in Rajasthan (India) and Gansu (China), and it assesses the phone’s role as a platform for mhealth services. Methods involved in this investigation include a combination of quantitative and qualitative techniques, social network analysis, and participatory agent-based modelling. This pilot project also lays the groundwork for exciting interdepartmental collaborations and a new “Mobile Technologies and Health” research unit at the Technology and Management for Development Centre (Oxford Department of International Development).