A how-to guide on using and implementing RapidSMS for mobile data collection and communication.
Ths manual give an overview for how to implement and use RapidSMS in a mobile data collection project. RapidSMS is a SMS framework for data collection, group coordination, and complex SMS workflows. The tutorial outlines when and when not to use RapidSMS, guides the user through project steps and milestones, outlines factors for a successful implementation, and provides worksheets for project planning. Example training materials are included.
Kanchan Banga, Tanti Liesman, Alicia Meulensteen, Jennifer Wiemer
Publication Type:
Report/White paper
Publication Date:
1 Apr 2009
Abstract:
What prevents humanitarian non-government organizations (NGOs) from adopting technology that can potentially improve their operations and response time? Global Relief Technologies, a producer of handheld data collection devices, asked a New York University Capstone Team to research the barriers to NGO PDA adoption. The Capstone Team conducted 17 interviews with nine organizations, from animal welfare to humanitarian relief, to discover the financial, technical, and institutional barriers preventing groups from implementing technology into their field programs. The Team also conducted two case studies of groups currently using PDA technology, one domestic and one international, to explore in depth the factors that went into the decision making processes these groups followed in their technology acquisition decisions.
This guest post was written by Nicolas di Tada, Director of Platform Engineering at InSTEDD. He writes about an ingeniousway for health workers to accurately transmit semi-structured data via mobile. His post is reprinted here with permission.
During August 2009, we went on a number of field trips to health centers in remote areas of Thailand and Cambodia. The idea was to conduct a few usability tests on Geochat syntax alternatives that we were exploring. Our goal was to simplify the interaction between health workers and the system to ultimately allow them to report disease cases in a semi-structured way.
The case information always originates at the local health center level - this is where the patient comes and gets diagnosed. Most of the case reports are made through phone calls to the district level (the higher administrative level). Case details get lost when the district level summarizes the information by disease and reports the quantity of each to the provincial level.
A research group at the University of Washington has done what few others manage – turn a research project into a real-world application. Open Data Kit (ODK) is a collection of tools that allows organizations to collect and send data using mobile phones. The system, in operation for about a year, has already been used for projects such as counseling and testing HIV patients in Kenya to monitoring forests in the Brazilian Amazon.
What is ODK?
The project began when University of Washington (UW) professor Gaetano Borriello began a sabbatical at Google to build a mobile data collection system. He brought along some of his PhD students from UW’s Computer Science and Engineering program to work on the idea as their intern project, and ODK was born.
Two of the fastest-growing and popular mobile data collection tools have recently seen some exciting upgrades in newly released versions.
Open Data Kit recently released v1.1 of ODK Collect. Open Data Kit (ODK) is a suite of tools to help organizations collect, aggregate and visualize their data. ODK Collect is powerful phone-based replacement for paper forms. Collect is built on the Android platform and can collect a variety of form data types: text, location, photos, video, audio, and barcodes. ODK Collect can be downloaded in the Android marketplace or here. The developers also have a demo video that describes the new features of the release. Open Data Kit is a member of the Open Mobile Consortium of which MobileAtive.org is a founding member.
Some of the new features of ODK Collect include barcode scanning, image/audio/video capture and playback, editing of saved forms, and device metadata (phone number, IMEI, IMSI) support. GPS acquisition and form processing is a faster, and the developers added review data entry. The user interface has been field tested and reworked to make training and use much easier. ODK Collect also supports question grouping, repeats, constraints, complex logic, and multiple languages.
ODK is currently deployed for HIV counseling with AMPATH in Kenya, user feedback gathering for Grameen's AppLab in Uganda, war crime documentation with the Berkeley Human Rights Center in the Central African Republic, and forest monitoring with the Brazilian Forest Service.
Meanwhile, our friends over at Datadyne have released version 2.0 of their popular mobile data collection platform EpiSurveyor. For some of the very cool GPS features of that, see the video below. EpiSurveyor is a free, user-friendly mobile-phone-and-web-based data collection system. Version 2.0 has many new features such as GPS (users with GPS-enabled phones (like the Nokia E71) can automatically create a "GPS stamp" for every record collected AND automatically see the results on a Google map, all within EpiSurveyor.org), advanced logic, including skip logic; numeric range limits for data entry; and a much better user interface for the web-backend.
EpiSurveyor is used by organizations around the world. One organization, TulaSalud in Guatemala, uses EpiSurveyor for maternal health. The video below (en Espanol) explains how the organization is using the tool.
Video informativo de TulaSalud, sobre la aplicación del sistema de monitoreo epidemiológico aplicado con la tecnología de EpiSurveyor, el cual pretende tener a tiempo real el reporte epidemiológico de las comlunidades.
Here is an updated version of our overview that includes the newly-released FrontlineSMS forms client, and Nokia Data Gathering, a mobile data collection tool designed for social researchers and NGOs. Here is the summary:
FrontlineSMS
The FrontlineSMS forms client was released last week. It adds basic data collection functionality to the SMS messaging tool. The forms client is a Java application, with all data transfer done via SMS. The workflow for FrontlineSMS forms is as follows:
