There's one word that can aptly describe the mobile health market in its entirety. Nascent. And it's been lingering in this stage for years, said industry officials at the 2013 mHealth Summit this week. So, what's finally going to move the market forward? For many, it involves taking a little closer look at history. 

 

The historical efforts of mobile health initiatives worldwide have something to teach us, said Kirsten Ostherr, professor of media studies at Rice University. 

 

One of these lessons involves personalization. Ostherr cited a Rockefeller Foundation campaign launched in 1910 that aimed at eradicating hookworm, which at that time infected some 40 percent of the southern U.S. population. 

 

[See also: Sex health goes mobile.]

 

"What they wanted to do is make a film to teach audiences how to avoid becoming infected with this disease, but they quickly learned that making a movie and showing it in movie theaters was not going reach the audience they wanted to reach," said Ostherr. "So instead they had to drive around a truck with a mobile, battery-operated film unit on it to reach their target audience where they lived and worked," which was predominately farms and rural settings.

 

But making the film mobile was only half the battle.

 

Ostherr said the real difficulty came when Rockefeller Foundation launched the mobile media hookworm campaign global. "There the challenge was in designing culturally appropriate content that could successfully convey the core health principles they wanted to convey in a manner that made sense to the people they were trying to reach," she added. 

 

With diverse populations worldwide, foundation officials realized they had to adapt and personalize film content, incorporating not only local languages but also including user generated images and stories. Once they started this, they started to see success, but ultimately, "generating new versions of the film for every single market" became an "untenable business proposition," said Ostherr, so they eventually abandoned these efforts.  

 

In today's world, a holistic understanding of demographics, together with a population's infrastructure, is most crucial, agreed Harry Greenspun, MD, senior advisor for Deloitte. 

 

"It's not the big issue of, 'we should build it, and they will come.' It's how do we have these technologies fit in with the needs of users throughout the world," he said at the Dec. 9 mHealth Summit panel. 

 

[See also: mHealth forecast wows audience.]