New companies spawned by MIT students are exploring ways that cell phones can help people in developing nations by diagnosing diseases.

Patients who live in a remote village may spend a whole day or more traveling to the nearest clinic to be tested and diagnosed and receive treatment or a prescription drug for their health problems.

Moca, a nonprofit company that is part of the MIT Media Lab's NextLab program, which seeks to develop cell phone applications geared toward the developing world, has formed new open-source software system designed to help these patients. The software would allow patients to transmit their health information, including pictures, to a doctor or nurse in a remote location in order to receive a preliminary diagnosis and to find out whether the condition warrants a trip to the clinic.

"In developing countries, 80 percent of all physicians are in urban areas," while most of the people live in the countryside, saidMoca team member Richard Lu, an MIT graduate student in biomedical informatics.

The Moca team won the People's Choice award at the NextLab competition in May. Several team members, supported by a Public Service Center grant, will carry out field tests for the software in the Philippines this summer.

Click Diagnostics, a start-up company based in Cambridge, Mass., has been focusing on ways to get software like Moca's effectively deployed in developing countries. Company co-founder Ting Shih, a fellow at the MIT Sloan School of Management, will be testing the systems this summer in South Africa, Ghana, Uganda, Kenya and Botswana.

Shih said that as a for-profit business, her group aims to empower local entrepreneurs to set up their own diagnostic services as sustainable local businesses. Click Diagnostics, which won the Development Track award in last year's MIT $100K competition, aims to form partnerships with medical associations, mobile phone companies and non-governmental organizations, she said.