India Mobile World Congress 2019 - mHealth Session

India Mobile World Congress 2019 - Session on “mHealth - Enabling the ecosystem for Health Care Transformation: Role of Communication technologies”

15 October 2019 - New Delhi, India

There is a lot we can learn from India. With “Ayushman Bharat”, India is running the world’s largest health care scheme. Like Prime Minister Modi, ITU believes in harnessing digital technology to transform health care and to advance health for all.

For example, take artificial intelligence. Advances in knowledge discovery and data mining hold great promise for the healthcare industry. Medical databases are the next frontier. It is early days, but AI-powered technologies such as skin disease recognition and diagnostic applications based on symptom questions could be deployed on 6 billion smartphones by 2021. That is why ITU and WHO have launched an initiative to leverage the power of artificial intelligence for health.

ITU and WHO have a long history of collaboration. But with the increasing use of technology in the health sector, our collaboration has grown considerably in recent years. With this new initiative, our organizations are working towards the standardization of a framework for the performance benchmarking of ‘AI for Health’ algorithms to address health issues such as breast cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, vision loss and skin lesions.

The demand for this a platform was identified at ITU’s annual “AI for Good Global Summit” in Geneva. Our objective is to develop evaluation methods to assess the degree to which ‘AI for Health’ use cases have achieved ‘Proof of Concept’. This initiative is improving our understanding of how we could best navigate the challenges surrounding access to health data and the appropriate use of that data.

It is important that the technology used in the health sector complies with international standards to ensure interoperability and security  ̶  and that the radio equipment operates in harmonized radio frequency bands to avoid harmful interference. This also has the benefit of reducing costs through the resulting economies of scale, and avoids being locked into proprietary standards that do not interoperate with other vendors’ equipment. 

The development of international standards for ICT equipment and services, and the harmonization of the world-wide use of the radio spectrum are ITU’s core competencies. So when it comes to digital health, clearly ITU and WHO collaboration is essential.

Now, universal health coverage will be possible only when everyone is connected. And right now, just over half the world’s population is connected to the Internet. The other unconnected half are mostly those living in rural or remote communities where topography and demography too often defeat market viability.

Fortunately, several new low-earth orbiting satellite networks are being planned in which thousands of small simple satellites promise to provide world-wide coverage with low latency and at affordable prices. In addition to satellite-based technologies, new stratospheric-based radio systems that are referred to as “high-altitude platform stations” are being developed specifically to provide affordable broadband connectivity and telecommunication services in underserved communities in rural and remote areas.  

These technologies, and many more, are on the agenda of ITU’s upcoming World Radiocommunication Conference 2019 (WRC-19), which will take place in Sharm-El-Sheikh in less than 2 weeks. This conference will update the Radio Regulations, the only international treaty on the use of the radio spectrum and satellite orbits. New globally harmonized spectrum will be found for all the technologies I mentioned earlier.

There is an expression in India – “Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas” (Collective Effort, Inclusive Development). At least half the world’s population still lacks access to essential health services.  The decisions of WRC-19 will pave the way to achieving ITU’s mission to connect the world, which will bring so many benefits to so many people, including all those who still lack access to the health services they need.

Thank you for your attention.