Mobile Engagement Resource Center

Text messaging is a surprisingly good way to get candid responses to sensitive questions, according to a new study to be presented this week at the annual meeting of the American Association for Public Opinion Research.

“The preliminary results of our study suggest that people are more likely to disclose sensitive information via text messages than in voice interviews,” says Fred Conrad, a cognitive psychologist and Director of the Program in Survey Methodology at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research (ISR).

Read the results at umich

With recent statistics showing Kenya’s maternal mortality ratio at 488 per 100,000 live births, a new monitoring system for expectant mothers is set to ease the number of deaths during childbirth.

The app ensures the health workers, midwives and the pregnant mothers share health information and care tips using SMS and prepaid calls. The system, which offers prepaid mobile phone credit for checks and health information updates, allows expectant women to call or send SMS to health experts for free, for information on antenatal care and delivery services.

Read the story at nextweb

Smartphones users are spending a lot of time browsing social networks on their phones and Facebook seems to be their network of choice.

A new study released today by digital research company ComScore shows that the average U.S. Facebook mobile user spent more than seven hours perusing the site via cell phone in March and around six hours via the computer.

Read more cnet

AIDS related deaths account for close to 60% of all total deaths annually and mobile phone penetration has doubled over the last 10 years.

It is for these reasons that the World Health Organisation (WHO) embarked on an investigation to determine whether mobile phone technology could be used to transform the delivery of health care services to AIDS patients in Africa.

Read more at africanews

­Global shipments of smartphones in the first three months of this year grew 45% year on year to 146 million units, but significant country and regional differences were apparent, according to Canalys.

Shipments in the USA rose just 5% year-on-year, in marked contrast to the 81% growth seen across the Asia Pacific region. Shipments in China doubled and overtook those in the US for the first time. In Q1, China represented 22% of global smart phone shipments, while the US accounted for 16%. A year earlier these figures were the other way around. Of the top 10 countries for smart phones, half are now in the Asia Pacific region

Read the article at cellular-news

As smartphone users have grown more comfortable forking over information about their bank accounts and physical whereabouts to mobile applications, a growing group of app developers are betting health-related data will be next.

Consider Bethesda-based M3 Information. The company has created an app that asks patients a series of nearly 30 questions designed to assess whether they exhibit symptoms of depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder or post-traumatic stress disorder.

Read the article at washingtonpost

Imagine a vaccine box that sends you an SMS everytime the temperature in it rises, threatening the quality of vaccines in it.

Indian scientists are calling it “a thermometer with a SIMCARD in it” . In what will greatly reduce vaccines going bad due to temperature fluctuations – a phenomenon that could endanger the life of a child injected with the vaccine, the Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI) is just four weeks away from field testing a unique temperature measurement system which will sense the temperature in the vaccine box and on an hourly basis send an SMS to a server in charge of temperature reading.

Read the story at timesofindia

The project would provide 150 MTN motorized custom tricycles worth GH¢ 468,882.00 to physically challenged persons in high traffic locations across the country.

The tricycles, powered by solar-enabled devices, would serve as sales points for airtime, SIM cards, and SIM and mobile money registration among others.

Mrs Cynthia Lumor, Corporate Services Executive-MTN, launching the project said, the project formed part of MTN’s effort at promoting employment in the country.

Read the story at ghanaweb

Marion Underwood calls her academic study, “The Blackberry Project.” A title that would work equally well is “Panopticon, Jr.” For the past four years, the University of Texas-Dallas developmental psychology professor has essentially wire-tapped 175 Texas teens,  capturing every text message, email, photo, and IM sent on Blackberries that she provided to them, creating a rich database that now contains millions of funny, explicit, sexual, and inane messages for academic study. Half a million new messages pour into the database every month.

Read more at forbes

In news that probably won’t surprise parents of text-obsessed teenagers, Canadians sent an average of almost 2,500 SMS messages every second last year, for a total of about 78 billion.

That figure was up almost 40 per cent from 2010, when the texting tally hit 56.4 billion messages.

Read the story at ctv.ca