Mobile Health Promotion and Web 3.0

This week the MaRS Discovery District in Toronto is hosting NetChange Week, which describes itself as being “A week exploring tech for change” .

(follow comment on Twitter using #ncwk).

Yesterday’s focus was on mobile technologies and the ways in which they’ve been used to promote health and facilitate fundraising and knowledge development with non-profits. A series of innovations and novel forms of engagement were proposed, most notably in the area of sexual health.

Toronto Public Health presented work on a sexual health promotion program that uses proximity marketing through Bluetooth technologies. Health promoters with TPH go into the (mostly) gay community, particularly bars and clubs, wearing monitors that allow people to opt-in to receive Bluetooth-transported messages directly to their phones. The messages, contained in a GIF format so they can be viewed at a later time, provide a discrete way to deliver sexual health information specifically suited to the gay population.

Another similar program came from Black Cap, which has sought to engage the black community in Toronto through a variety of sexual health programs aimed at men who have sex with men and youth. The latter program involves a group of youth opinion leaders / health promoters who use text messages and their personal social networks to spread positive health messages in the community. Thus far, the program appears to be creating a buzz and leading to some action.

A third presentation from Lisa Campbell Salazar, a health promoter working with TakingITGlobal (among others), presented her research on youth and mobile technologies. Although the survey was not all focused on health issues, they certainly provided highlights (details of the survey can be found here).

One of the most salient findings from this survey was that mobile tools provide youth with a safe, accessible way to offer peer support to one another and connect in real time in situations where their health risk behaviour takes place. As TPH Health Promoter Michelle Hamilton-Page said in her presentation:

No one who is coming up to our booth is having sex at the moment, they need information for later when they are. Mobile phones provide a means to do that.

This is the bottom line for mobile technologies and health promotion. It provides support where people are — literally and figuratively — rather than where we wish them to be. Where we wish them to be are in places where we don’t have to work too hard to reach them (or are not complex): clinics, traditional media spaces, office buildings. Traditional media is usually passive, it can be crafted in boardrooms and office buildings, with little need to actually engage the community your trying to reach*. It is harder to do that with mobile messaging (although there are examples where this works in practice — TPH’s messages are crafted in advance, but the way they are delivered by an ambassador in the community adds that customized component that is part of the message. Black Cap’s youth opinion leaders custom craft their own messages on the fly using guidelines).

*- although even traditional media tries to solicit input before deploying things into the field.

Traditional, developer-designed, limited-authored websites (Web 1.0) allowed us the opportunity to broadcast messages in new ways to an enormous population. Social media enabled people to not only take part in a conversation, but initiate and re-create dialogical spaces and express themselves in ways that transcend text to pictures, video and other creative media (Web 2.0). Mobile technologies combine both of these earlier phases and enable conversations to take place where people are physically situated, freed of wired connections (Web 3.0). Here, the concept of ‘web’ is truly a network, a spiderweb of connections that are poised to promote health and engage the public in new ways.

It is here that the future of health promotion,  and public health more broadly, lies.