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Krishnan Ganapathy, a practicing neurosurgeon, is the former president of the Neurological Society of India and current president of the Apollo Telemedicine Networking Foundation. He is also the co-founder of the Telemedicine Society of India, a member of the National Task Force on Telemedicine and an adjunct professor at IIT Madras and at Anna University. He is currently involved in preliminary studies on the clinical evaluation of patients based in rural areas of India, Bhutan, and Bangladesh using wireless telephony. Along with his colleague Aditi Ravindra, Dr. Ganapathy is one of the leading thinkers on mobile health in India and around the world.

What follows is an edited, abridged transcribe from a conversation we had at Rockefeller's Making the eHealth Connection conference. An MP3 of our entire discussion is available for download.

DS: A lot of people don't have an understanding of what mHealth is, what telemedicine is, and how mobile phones are being used by physicians, surgeons, and health care professionals. You've been on the cutting edge of all this for a long time ... can you talk to me about how the way you treat patients has changed over the years with the use of mobile phones?

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A journlalist I know, Jatindra Dash from the eastern Indian state of Orissa, started this rather interesting SMS-based news-service in the Oriya language which is spoken by some 31 million people.

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In a mobile phone game in India, a cricket match is played between the teams Demons XI and Safety XI. A report about the game describes it as a “cricket-based game involving balls in the form of condoms, faithful partners, information on HIV and the symbolic AIDS red ribbon.” A team wins by avoiding “googlies and doosra balls - unsafe sex, infected blood transfusions, infected syringes and the company of bad friends.”

The game is part of a growing market of "edutainment" mobile phone games -- games that are designed to provide entertainment and be educational at the same time.

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When Matthew Kam first went to India, he noticed the lack of English literacy of children that had studied English for three or four years. Most couldn't read, didn't know simple words, and sometimes couldn't spell their own names. "We realized that those students who had taken English for three years couldn't read every letter in the alphabet," Matt said. "Teachers who were teaching English couldn't speak English themselves." However, the English literacy of these same children improved dramatically when presented with a unique learning tool: a mobile phone.

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There's a great article about spread of mobile phones in India and Africa on the BBC News website.

For instance, it mentions how migrant Zimbabwean workers in South Africa send money back using M-banking and avoid having to pay bribes to border guards when they go home.

Officials in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh have stopped a text messaging service that gave out drivers' contact details.

Under the scheme, anyone could send a text to access a vehicle owner's name, address and phone number.

Officials say the original idea was to provide "citizen-centric services" and assist police and investigating agencies: "SMS us the vehicle registration number... and get all the information - vehicle, tax and owner's details etc," read the advertisement put out by the state transport department.

But the facility, launched a year ago, was withdrawn after women complained that they were being harassed by men, and most of the information being sought pertained to young women.

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The rural mobile market is growing, and carriers are working to meet the unique demands and challenges of this sector of the population. Even in the poorest countries -- like Sierra Leone, which ranks 176 out of 177 countries on the UN's 2006 Human Development Index -- mobile phones have become a growing necessity, creating a unique set of cultural norms and practices.

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