MIT project leads to programs that help health workers, farmers in developing countries

It's an unlikely medical device: a sleek smartphone more suited to a nightclub than a rural health clinic. But it's loaded with software that allows health workers in the remote northernmost Philippines province of Batanes to dramatically reduce the time it takes to get X-rays to a radiologist - and to get a diagnosis for a patient being tested for tuberculosis. The software, created by a nonprofit organization called Moca, is one of nearly two dozen cellphone-based projects that have sprung from NextLab, a course at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It's taught by Jhonatan Rotberg, who was sent to MIT by Telmex, one of Latin America's largest telecommunications companies, to bring cellular technology to the "90 percent of people" who fall outside of the marketing plans of most phone companies. Talking about his Telmex job, Rotberg made a peak with his hands. "We were dealing with the very top of the pyramid," he said as he sat in his office at MIT. "We spent most of our time trying to sell more phones and products to the middle class and the upper middle class." So three years ago, funded by a grant from Mexican investor Carlos Slim's foundation, Telmex sent Rotberg to MIT to research methods for using cellphones to help "the resource-constrained countries, aka developing countries, aka low-income countries." And when Rotberg settled into his research and teaching position at the Media Lab, he made a discovery: The same device that powers teenage texting in the United States can be adapted to help farmers in Mexico and illiterate women in India.