MobileActive.org

IT Without Software: Innovations In Mobile Data Collection. A Guest Post by Nicolas di Tada

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.