India suffers not only from a severe shortage of physicians — there is a deficit of about 600,000 doctors Tracking Illnesses in India countrywide — but also from a large gap between the urban and rural populations regarding the availability of health care. For every 100,000 residents, there were about 4.48 hospitals in urban areas and 0.77 in rural areas in 2005. What’s more, in 2010 there were six times as many physicians in cities as in the countryside, where about 70 percent of all Indians live. Robust and inexpensive medical devices like the Fetal Heart Rate Monitor could help to improve the health care of people in rural areas.