MedAfrica, a mobile health-care app developed by Kenya-based Shimba Technologies, has won the 2012 Ericsson Application Awards first prize in the company category.
MedAfrica seeks to improve the health of communities and regions in Africa by increasing access to health-care information and services via mobile phone.
The app aggregates health information from the Web. It also contains up to date health information for both doctors and patients has a list of common diseases in Africa, their symptoms and treatment. The app further offers a list of recommended drugs complete with drug authenticators.
MedAfrica also has a database of specialists in all major health fields, hospital listings, medical news, diets and offers health or immunization alerts.
According its developers, Shimba Technologies, MedAfrica’s immediate plans after winning the award is to include Africa’s common ailments country by country and hospital by hospital in its directory listings. The MedAfrica team was represented by Jackie Akai, Caroline Ngugi and Steve Mutinda.
Commenting on the achievement, Jan Färjh, Head of Ericsson Research and host of the awards said: “Med Africa and Clio Super Painter are two excellent examples of applications in the Networked Society. We are very proud of highlighting the team’s achievements.”
With a population of about 1 billion, Africa has a small health workforce of 2 million. The app expects to reduce the gap between patients and doctors.
According to Steve Mutinda the CEO Shimba Technologies, using mobile apps in health makes sense as Kenya alone has more than 28 million mobile phone subscribers compared to the 7000 qualified doctors serving more than 40 million.
“MedAfrica began last year in August as MedKenya. At that time, we were brainstorming over what content our Tuvitu platform should have, it’s then that we discovered an inadequacy in the local health content,” Steve Mutinda the CEO Shimba Technologies said.
MedAfrica operates in East Africa. The firm expects to be on more than 200 types of mobile phones and to generate over US$2 billion per year in the next five years. It currently works on Android, Symbian S40, USSD, SMS and mobile web.
The Ericsson Apllication Awards, themed the Networked society, are in their third consecutive year. This year’s competitions had 143 teams from more than 50 countries participating.
Four finalist teams from China, Egypt and Kenya showcased their apps before an expert jury that later declared a winner in each of the two categories: students and companies. Each winning team received EUR 15,000 and the runners up EUR 10,000. This year’s theme, in cooperation with Sony Mobile, was the Networked Society.
Another African health care app Nabda Care from Egypt won the special Technology for Good prize for their Health Book application. The app uses mobile and cloud technology in a scalable solution to enable users and society to access affordable health-care services.
Ericsson Headquarters in Stockholm, Sweden, hosted the event.
