Last week, David Wood and I attended a couple of academic conferences that illustrate how “Mobiles are changing the world”

The first was a Research Review presented by the Mobile Virtual Centre of Excellence (MobileVCE).

Mobile VCE supports a wide range of mobile-related research. We saw presentations ranging from Green Radio -  improving our carbon footprint by reducing the huge power consumption of mobile infrastructure – through UI-improvement initiatives to visions of ubiquitous-computing “virtual assistants” that show a very believable future world of business that would have been amazing science fiction a few years ago.

Mobile VCE Industrial Members

Then off to the London International Development Centre for a workshop on Mobiles in Development and Health. The LIDC is an organisation of the University of London that asssists the university’s colleges in developing countries.

Here we saw how the widespread use of mobile technology is changing developing countries perhaps even faster than in the developed world,  and how it enables and empowers health-improvement programmes, agricultural and veterinary schemes, and environmental studies.

These projects use local people’s mobiles for communication and data-gathering at a “grass roots” level that can bypass the delays and difficulties that naturally occur in centralised programmes of governments or NGOs. Examples ranged from using mobiles to collect data on the spread of East Coast Fever among cattle in Zanzibar through to monitoring the growth rate of trees in Ethiopia for ecological studies of carbon-sequestration.

These reports showed how the almost-universal availability of SMS messaging continues to make it an important  method for transmitting data gathered in remote locations, where mobile internet can remain unavailable.

Development workers could benefit from improved mobile data-collection tools that can adapt to the local infrastructure using either mobile internet or “fall-back” to SMS. I have opened a discussion thread on this topic on research.symbian.com – if you have interest or experience in this area, or especially if you are interested in helping develop such tools, please join in the discussion.