Umeå University and KI researchers publish journal articles on mobile health

The issue mHealth for Improved Access and Equity in Health Care includes 10 articles, written by global health researchers. Lucie Laflamme, professor of injury epidemiology and prevention at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, is guest editor for the special issue. Global Health Action is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by the Epidemiology and Global Health Unit at Umeå University with financial support from the Wallenberg Foundation and Umeå University.

A common theme of the articles is a focus on image-based mHealth as a tool for diagnostic support and treatment advice:

• In an introduction, Carl Bildt describes how digitalization, the proliferation of smartphones and the expanding area of applications, as well as an increasing availability of wireless networks across the globe present entirely new opportunities to develop digital methods for healthcare. But a positive development in the mHealth area requires better security standards in general.
• The first four articles address the potential and extent of mHealth solutions, considering existing technical, organisational and user conditions.
• Two articles present clinical perspectives on the implementation and use of mHealth, considering regulatory, technological, and user perspectives, as well as patient issues and shared decision-making.
• Two subsequent articles describe ongoing interventions where mHealth applications have been used for diagnostic support for acute burn injuries and malaria.
• The ninth article outlines the process of development of mHealth solutions for diagnostic assistance at the point of care and how an interactive roundtable led to the development of main components of an implementation roadmap. The two-day roundtable was organised in February 2017 by the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS-Wallenberg Centre) in South Africa and involved a variety of stakeholders, including researchers, healthcare providers, policymakers and developers from 16 countries.
• The final article addresses how digitalization changes society as a whole and introduces radically new ways of doing tasks and addressing issues, not least in the field of human-computer interaction.

Link to special issue of Global Health Action

On Twitter @GlobalHealthAction

For more information, please contact:

Lars Weinehall, Department of Public Health and Clinical Medicine, Umeå UniversityPhone: +46(0)90 786 5228
Email: lars.weinehall@umu.se

Lucie Laflamme, Department of Public Health Sciences, Karolinska InstitutetPhone: +46 (0)8 524 83362
Email: lucie.laflamme@ki.se

Editor: Daniel Harju