Mobile Researcher Community » Publications

The use of mobile phones as a data collection tool: A report from a household survey in South Africa

Andi — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 10:43:03 +0000

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.

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.

Oral presentations at PHASA 2009 on mHealth

Andi — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 07:12:48 +0000

It’s very encouraging and gratifying to see two oral presentations at this year’s Public Health Association of South Africa conference based on experiences of organisations making use of Mobile Researcher.

For us, it’s a strong indication that the use of mobile and web technologies is becoming more widely accepted in the public health community as a viable and valuable tool in tackling primary health care issues.

The presentations at the conference where Mobile Researcher was involved include:

Experiences of using cell phones in data collection in a large scale project (V. Magasana, P. Ijumba, Z. Msimela, S. Ndwandwe, N. Radebe, M. Msweli, S. Mavuso)
Using a web based information system to manage the implementation of a randomised controlled trial (P. Ijumba, Y. Singh, M. Tomlinson)

Several other organisations present findings on studies where Mobile Researcher was also leveraged as a data collection tool.

HST release Clinic Committee research conducted with Mobile Researcher

Andi — Wed, 27 May 2009 17:09:31 +0000

The Health Systems Trust, a South African based NGO and long term Mobile Researcher collaborator has published a report entitled “The Status of Clinic Committees in Primary Level Public Health Sector Facilities in South Africa”.

To quote from the report,

“The aim of this study was to assess the existence and functioning of health governance structures in the form of clinic committees in order to identify opportunities for strengthening their role in governance.”

Interestingly, the research was conducted telephonically, with the HST contacting and surveying over 2,500 clinics. Although not field-based, HST equipped each data collector with a low cost Nokia 2626 handset (retailing for a few hundred Rand) which they used to conduct the telephonic survey and capture the responses of facility managers.

Instead of using traditional Computer Assisted Telephony Interview (CATI) techniques, whereby each data collector would have required a computer, they were able to follow the survey flow and capture responses using a familiar mobile phone. This allowed HST to cut infrastructure costs substantially without relying on paper-based processes.

The full report is available for download on the Health Systems Trust website.