Uchunguzi (Journal Watch/Montre de Journal

The worldwide shift to mobile technology is occurring rapidly in both low/middle-income countries (LMIC) and high-income countries (HIC). In Africa, mobile phone use is now commonplace: in Kenya, for example, over 80% of the population now have access to a mobile phone (increased from only 10% in 2002). For profes- sional health workers who might be most interested in mobile- based learning, smartphone adoption has accelerated sharply in the past 2–3 years. Already 28% of people in Kenya with sec- ondary-level or higher education now own a smartphone, as do 88% of Nairobi medical students. This offers an opportunity to explore mobile-based training apps as potential tools with which to improve access to emergency care training for health workers in these settings. As an example, a particular challenge in the emergency clinical setting is the ability to correctly sequence a complex series of actions appropriate to situational cues in real time, as in the resuscitation algorithm. Opportunities to practice such sequences of fast, accurate cue-response activity can be rela- tively rare in the clinical setting and expensive using high-fidelity simulator technology; mobile devices could enable rehearsal and assessment of both speed and accuracy of algorithm recall, easily repeated to reinforce learning. In this article, a team working to develop mobile technology-assisted training in the field of paedi- atric emergency care in LMICs suggests the following principles that may be useful both for other developers and for those consid- ering using such tools in their professional lives; adoption of a development strategy appropriate for the rapidly moving world of mobile technology, partnership and collaboration between high-income and low-income settings, ambition to evaluate effec- tiveness in the medium-to-long term, and recognition of the limi- tations and qualifications of mobile technology