ODID's Proochista Ariana, Marco Haenssgen and Xiaolan Fu along with Felix Reed-Tsochas (Said Business School) and Gari Clifford (Biomedical Engineering) have won a Fell Fund award of £28,068 for an interdisciplinary pilot project on mobile technologies and health in China and India.

The project, hosted by the Technology and Management Centre for Development (TMCD), brings together research and expertise from four departments and three divisions across the University. Despite growing interest in mobile health applications, there is a dearth of basic information on how people use mobile devices for health.

This project investigates the ways in which mobile phone utilisation can affect access to healthcare services among rural populations in Rajasthan (India) and Gansu (China). To carry out this research, a combination of quantitative and qualitative techniques, social network analysis, and participatory agent-based modelling will be employed. This pilot project also lays the groundwork for exciting interdepartmental collaborations and a new “Mobile Technologies and Health” research unit at the TMCD.