Contextual Barriers to Mobile Health Technology in African Countries: A Perspective Piece

Abstract

On a global scale, healthcare practitioners are now beginning to move from traditional desktop-based computer technologies towards mobile computing environments. Consequently, such environments have received immense attention from both academia and industry, in order to explore these promising opportunities, apparent limitations, and implications for both theory and practice. The application of mobile IT within a medical context, referred to as mobile health or mHealth, has revolutionised the delivery of healthcare services as mobile technologies offer the potential of retrieving, modifying and entering patient-related data/ information at the point-of-care. As a component of the larger health informatics domain mHealth may be referred as all portable computing devices (e.g. mobile phones, mobile clinical assistants and medical sensors) used in a healthcare context to support the delivery of healthcare services.