In late December 2009, the BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making journal published a technical advance which outlined the experiences of organisations making use of Mobile Researcher “to investigate the feasibility, the ease of implementation, and the extent to which community health workers with little experience of data collection could be trained and successfully supervised to collect data using mobile phones in a large baseline survey”.

The article is available for download here but I’d like to highlight some key findings and comments:

Overall, our findings demonstrate that mobile phone based data collection is feasible at scale.

The software application and web-based interface enhanced real-time supervision of data collectors.

Real-time supervision of CHW performance was a significant advance over previous implementation work.

The automated graphs and real-time information allowed supervisors to focus their time on other aspects of quality control and solving logistical difficulties in the field.

Our experience with a large scale baseline survey suggests that the real-time quality control and data collector supervision enabled by the use of a mobile phone based survey system make this an attractive management option and preferable to a paper based approach.

One clarification I’d like to make on a point mentioned in the publication is that although the source code for the custom management system as described in the article may be released under an open source license agreement (at the election of the software sponsor), there is no intention (at present) for the core Mobile Researcher source code to be released under such an agreement.