Qtel Group, the leading telecom services company in the Mena region, sponsored the recently concluded GSMA Mobile Health Summit in South Africa, designed to create innovative health applications.

Qtel Group addressed critical issues of the day at the event’s thought-leadership conference, including how mobile operators can step forward to play a vital role in how growing populations can access and leverage mHealth services to better manage wellness, prevention, and chronic disease.

Qtel Group executives said that national eHealth strategies to make healthcare more efficient and affordable were key to bringing more benefits to more people while reducing the burdens put on hospital systems.

For the competition, teams of university students were asked to develop mobile health concepts that would address specific needs.

Among the 12 finalists were a contingent from the Arab World, including Lebanon’s Notre Dame University and the Jordan University of Science and Technology. The team from Indonesia’s Bandung Institute of Technology was supported in its efforts by Indosat, a Qtel Group Company, as part of Indosat Innovation Lab in Jakarta.

Jordan’s University of Science and Technology’s mobile-based “Snore Detector” was named as one of four finalists, and the overall winner was a joint team from MIT from the US and the Federal University of Rio Grande Do Norte from Brazil, who created the Sana AudioPulse.

Supported by industry group the GSMA, Qtel Group and Qualcomm, the Mobile Health University Challenge aims to engage the brightest and best student minds to pioneer mobile health concepts, applications, and devices compatible with wellness, awareness, diagnosis, treatment and monitoring, clinician support tools and health information systems.

The competition comes at an opportune time for the mobile industry, with recent analysis by PricewaterhouseCoopers suggesting that mobile-enabled services will become integral to healthcare delivery by 2017, creating a global market worth about $23 billion.

GSMA estimates there are more than 320 different medical applications of mobile technology currently in use around the world. Companies from across the Qtel Group are working to enhance mHealth offerings for customers, with a number of recent innovations released by Wataniya Kuwait, Asiacell, and Wataniya Maldives, as well as Indosat. – TradeArabia News Service