Now Blood Donors Can Get a Text When They Save Lives

Phone lines in Africa and South Asia would never have gotten to the poor - but these places have leapfrogged over last-century technology and gone straight to mobile phones. Now the same thing is happening with off-grid solar power: the fastest -- perhaps the only – way to power the poor.

The mobile phone is doing more than revolutionizing communication. It has the potential to improve many aspects of life in poor countries: commerce, health, agriculture, education - public health, especially, is being revolutionized by governments taking advantage of the mobile revolution by texting advice or sending voice messages to pregnant women, texting reminders to AIDS patients to take their meds, tracking the spread of diseases, allowing community health workers to keep records electronically and variations on all these themes.

Health communication systems designed for rural, developing countries -- where hospitals are often understaffed and transportation is inadequate -- are being adapted to improve care in U.S. cities.

If you've got a life-threatening medical condition, your first call might not be to an economist. But Alvin Roth used a theory about matching markets to help connect kidney patients and donors.

Organ donation waiting lists can often hold wait times of months or even years. Thousands of lives could be saved with better ways to reach to the millions of Americans willing to donate an organ.

The 2008 recession’s job losses spurred a development of a Do-It-Yourself economy. With the advent of Uber, Etsy, Airbnb, and others, the marketplace has become full of micro-entrepreneurs who thrive with independent web-assisted businesses.

In war zones, people have a difficult time finding clean water and safe areas to inhabit. Social media, smart phones, and technology applications are aiding in people’s survival. In Aleppo, Syria, the International Committee of the Red Cross posted a map on Facebook to show alternative sources of clean drinking water that reached approximately 140,000 people.

When many Latina immigrant women arrive in the United States, they don't have access to the internet to learn about the resources available to them. Únete Latina, a program run by Latinas, sends mobile phone texts to women with supportive messages in Spanish and with information about relevant news items and public services.

With human injustices affecting people on the streets around the world, camera phones have become important tools to document crimes. However, the video may not adequately capture the crime to be persuasive in court. The global organization WITNESS has formed as Video As Evidence Program to instruct citizens how to best document crimes with their cameras so that the evidence will stand in court.

An average of 28,000 children born in the U.S. each year die before their first birthday – and many more face disabilities and serious life-long health problems, often because they are born prematurely or at low birth weights. A free service, text4baby, delivers crucial health advice via text message to pregnant women and new mothers.