MobileActive.org

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.  

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.  

The core idea of ODK is that users who have paper-based processes that they want to digitize should be able to do so very easily. ODK allows users to manage data collection through their mobiles, and send that data to a local computer or cloud server. 

Says Yaw Anokwa, one of the original students who designed ODK (the core group was Gaetano Borriello, Yaw Anokwa, Carl Hartung, Waylon Brunette, and Adam Lerer), “We didn’t want to build one large, monolithic system that would be good for everybody – we wanted very small, modular, composable pieces that would all talk with each other. Any organization can pick up whichever pieces they want, tie them together and use them.” 

These small, modular pieces are fittingly called Collect, Aggregate, Manage, Validate, and Voice. 

Collect – Collect is a basic form-filling application that runs on the open source Android platform. Collect gives users form-filling with intelligent prompts, rich data types (text, location, audio, video, barcodes) and multiple language support. “Collect is primarily used as a replacement for paper forms. "It’s a lot more powerful than paper because the phones can ask you different questions based on what you enter,” explains Anokwa. 

Aggregate – Anokwa describes Aggregate as “A server that people can set up and run easily.” Aggregate was designed to run in the cloud, as a place to store data and then export that data to other places (other servers, Excel, maps, etc). It primarily runs on Google App Engine (which is free to use), but there is also a version that users can download onto their own local servers. 

Manage – Manage makes deploying the ODK system easier. For users with a large phone deployment, it is time-consuming to manually download the forms onto each individual phone and then update all the software and forms whenever new versions are released. Manage is a remote management suite of software that has two parts: one runs on the phone to figure out the phone's status, and the other runs on a server and provides a dashboard that can take care of all the updates. 

Validate – Validate allows users to make sure their forms are valid. Explains Anokwa, “It’s just a small piece of code that you put your form through, and it tells you ‘this is a proper form’ or ‘this form has a problem and this is where the mistake is.’” 

Voice – Voice compiles forms from a series of text prompts into a series of recorded voice prompts. Any answer that recipients give comes back in a compatible way so that it can be fed into Aggregate or other systems. Says Anokwa, “The idea here is that not everyone has a smart phone or even a feature phone. For some of these deployments, you want one or two pieces of data from your end users. For example, you can do an automated call to all your patients who have phones, and using their keypads they can answer a few questions about their symptoms. [...] It’s an easy way to automate workflow.”  

According to Anokwa, the UW research team knows of more than 1800 downloads of Collect, the most popular of the ODK tools, and the website has had more than 3000 unique visitors from more than 130 countries.  

The project was built as an open source project; at the heart of ODK is JavaRosa, an open source engine originally designed for basic feature phones. JavaRosa provides the form processing and form logic that ODK uses. Building on JavaRosa means ODK is compatible with a number of other projects including OpenMRS, EpiSurveyor, CommCare, OpenXData and GATHER. According to Anokwa, "This was part of the original design. You can use EpiSurveyor's mobile client to submit data to Aggregate, or use Collect to submit data to OpenMRS."  

Anokwa says that open source was key to both the speed with which ODK was developed and launched, and it’s evolving nature: “We built it from day one knowing that people would use it in ways that we couldn’t predict. So we tried to build it – not too flexible, because too flexible is bad – but flexible enough that it covers 80 or 90 percent of the cases we’ve seen. Our core group has worked on similar problems, so we have a sense of what people want data collection apps to do. And for the other 10 or 20 percent that we don't cover, the community can build themselves, because it's open source.” 

The software is free to download, but, of course, to use Collect, users must provide their own Android smart phone. Users also have to design their forms, which requires some expertise; i.e., customizing the forms to match the situation in which they’re used. Anokwa said multiple form designers are currently being designed by the community for release soon, including one from the ODK group. 

Because ODK was launched as a research project, it is not the full-time focus of the developers, whose day-to-day job is academic research. During the last few months, the core group has been transitioning from full-time to part-time. Says Anokwa, “That has been the biggest challenge. We all want to spend our time working on this project, but we simply can’t because of the constraints we have as students. Getting that process working well, where we can both support the project and do our research has been one of the hardest things.” 

To make the transition easier, the ODK group is working to make sure that the project keeps running if/when they move on to different aspects. ODK, which was originally funded through a grant from Google’s Android group and Google.org (Google’s philanthropic arm), recently received a $1.35 million grant from Google Research to continue the project.  Anokwa says the grant will not only fund the project for the next few years, but will also support future grad students who want to grow out the program to perform even more advanced operations (an example Anokwa suggested was attaching ultrasound wands to the phone – recording images and then sending the data to a doctor for immediate diagnosis). The money will also be used to eventually hire full-time developers to support the core ODK projects.

According to Anokwa, in the next few months ODK will be releasing more tools to add to the ODK suite.  

For now, the team balances their time between research and working with their deployment partners. As the focus of the group shifts to evaluation of the tools and even more cutting-edge development in the future, the uses for ODK will grow with its community.