A team competing in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s IDEAS Competition – where IDEAS stands for Innovation Development Enterprise Action Service – received an award for an innovative new way to get tuberculosis patients to take their drugs. TB is still a huge health concern in rural communities of poor countries, where getting people to adhere to strict treatment plans needed to treat the infection has proved quite the challenge. The solution, called CellCentives, offers a disposable package which reveals a special code when pills are removed within the required timeframe. Patients can then enter this code into their phones to receive free calling minutes. The catch is that if the pills are not removed within the requisite timeframe, no code is displayed.

This project is a reminder that while there is a lot of talk about how mobile applications will be used to increase commerce and change the corporate landscape, they can also be used for social good. In places like Africa where TB is an epidemic (second in magnitude only to AIDS), and where poor wire-line infrastructure make mobile phones the way that that rural communities connect with each other and the rest of the world, it’s no surprise that this solution won big points for its likelihood to make an impact. While the appetite for medicine may be small, MIT seems to think that the appetite for technology will take the cake in the infection prevention and treatment game. That said, at this stage this IDEA is still in its prototype stage, so we’ll need to wait and see – will a spoonful of technology help the medicine go down?