It’s exciting to think of the world as a highly connectedplace, where people, goods, and ideas spread easily and freely to the larger global population.  Through Twitter, you can hear about what is happening on the ground during a protest in a city thousands of miles away, and through the expansive network of international air travel, you can be on another continent within hours of leaving your home.  Of course, not everything nor everyone travels freely to everywhere they’d like to go, and not every idea moves seamlessly, but, for the most part, it feels like each year, we have m

Imagine you log into your Facebook* account on September 8, 2017. You see a scattering of updates from your friends—somebody accidentally swallowed their mobile phone, and somebody else is complaining that none of the 3000 shows that premiered on YouTube this season is any good.

Facebook Health - IFTF Artifact from the Future

The year is 2014. Jody has just experienced his first heart attack, at the age of 56. According to the latest guidelines from the American College of Cardiology, a man Jody’s age will benefit just as much from an angioplasty as from a more expensive bypass surgery. His doctors perform the angioplasty, following the latest safety protocol from the Institute of Medicine. Thanks to these guidelines, deaths from preventable medical errors have dropped from 100,000 in 2008 to just 10,000 in 2014.

In the recently released IFTF report entitled, Booting Up Mobile Health: From Medical Mainframe to Distributed Intelligence, we forecast that there will be high levels of experimentation and innovation in mobile health devices and services emerging from the Global South.  We expect poorer nations, including much of Sub-Saharan Africa, to develop into the main proving ground for decentralized, mobile models of health care delivery.  This is not only due to the rapid diffusion of mobile technology, but also because 20th-century models of centralized, institutionally managed health care