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Archive for the ‘Mobile’ Category

M4D Tech Trends 2011: What to expect and hope for

Jan 5, 2011 M4D, Mobile, Thoughts

Commoditization of Mobile Based Data Collection

With the growth and maturation of XForm authoring tools and mobile clients like ODK (my choice for best/most important mobile tool in 2010), it’s getting increasingly easy to do robust mobile based data collection. In 2011, expect the focus to shift towards building out web backends that provide support for unified data collection (Xforms, SMS, USSD, IVR) with greatly improved analytic and reporting capabilities. As a result, expect to see a lot more turnkey tools/services similar to EpiSurveyor.org. I wouldn’t be shocked even to see Google offer something in this space.

First Steps with IVR

Focus will start to shift from SMS to IVR as mHealth programs expand from service providers to beneficiaries where literacy is a lingering concern. While ODK Voice shows a lot of initial promise and Freedom Fone continues to be worth a look, there remains a lot of room for a new open-source tool in this space. My guess is that it’ll be built using FreeSwitch (not Asterisk) to support a local webservice offering similar, albeit more limited, functionalities to Twilio or Voxeo.

REST APIs for OpenMRS

If you’ve ever developed an mHealth application, you quickly realize you really don’t want to build your own medical record system. Things get complicated very quickly which is why the existence of platforms like OpenMRS is a very good thing. OpenMRS, however, has been strongly hindered by a lack of web API’s which makes building applications upon it difficult. This in turn has greatly limited the scope of how OpenMRS has currently been used. REST APIs are on the road map for v1.9 coming later this spring. With robust APIs, OpenMRS should be more accessible and flexible as a platform and in turn greatly expand it’s community of users. Until then, I like many potential users, will continue to dip my toes in the water despite wanting to dive in. If by 2012, I’m still waiting, I’ll probably start looking for a new swimming hole.

XForms and CouchDB

Expect to hear this combo increasingly. They just make a lot of sense together.

Direct to Client Services First to Reach Scale

Direct to client programs that incorporate SMS, USSD, IVR and “Please Call Me’s” could start to reach scale in 2011 that could reach into the millions. Groups like Text to Change and the Praekelt Foundation are starting to receive the funding necessary to bring their approaches to the masses. If positive impacts can be shown at scale, we’ll see rapid growth as donor’s jump into this space.

Building Block Webservices

There will continue to be a lot of talk around the need of an “enterprise architecture” in mHealth. While good, I think the growth towards this will be organic in the form of common web services that will attempt to bring order to the increasingly fractured mHealth ecosystem emerging in many countries. This would include services like a central mother and child registry providing each beneficiary a unique ID allowing them to be tracked across the health system. I’m not sure such a service could be built or deployed by the end of 2011 but the realization for the need of such a service will likely grow.

Community Health Platforms

Expect to see a lot less discussion about the differences in particular platforms (CommCare, ChildCount+, FrontlineSMS:Medic, Mwana, MoTeCH) and a lot more on more discusion on content and methodologies. In terms of functionality and to some extent underlying technology, many elements of the different platforms will converge. As the tools improve, the challenge really shifts to figuring what works and what doesn’t and how can technology best be used to create value. As a result, the realtime sharing of experiences, like on the incredible ICT4CHW mailing list, will only grow more important. Groups like Tiyaten Health, with little current technical knowledge but a lot of domain expertise, will become increasingly key to demonstrating mHealth success.

Functionally and technically, expect to see a lot of work done to strengthen the link between clinic and CHW programs to close the loop on things like referral tracking. Tools like ODK Clinic and Bhoma linked to an OpenMRS backend (pending APIs) will really drive this.

This year’s Ushahidi?

It’s hard to imagine a breakout project capturing the public imagination like Ushahidi has this year (even though I think the iHub is the bigger innovation). To me there are no clear or apparent frontrunners. Perhaps 2011 is meant to be more incremental.

What has me most excited is Shreddr, a project created by Kuang Chen, a PhD student at Berkeley. What Shreddr allows is to take a picture or scan of a filled out form and shred into individualized data components representing individual parameters of that form. These form elements can be combined with OCR and presented in a way that changes the dynamics of digitization of paper forms from data entry to data validation. Furthermore, since the forms are shredded, forms containing sensitive medical records could safely be farmed out in the form of microtasks for a local CHW or retiree sitting in Iowa to complete.

This year’s mHealth?

ICT4Ag. Mobiles have tremendous unexplored potential to improve the livelihoods of small scale farmers. Applications like Kilimo Salama show the use of mobiles is not just limited to providing market price information to farmers. As for me, I’m going to be shifting some of my thinking in 2011 to farms. They are a lot easier to count and don’t move around!

Tags: M4D

Introducing RapidResponse a mHealth Platform built with RapidSMS

Jul 9, 2009 Innovation, Kenya, RapidSMS, SMS, mHealth

I’m very proud to announce RapidResponse, a mHealth platform built with RapidSMS. This is a project that I have been working to develop at the Earth Institute with Professor Vijay Modi in collaboration with UNICEF Innovation team and a number of other partners for the Millennium Villages Project.

The idea for RapidResponse originated from a conversation with Jessica Fanzo, an amazing nutritionist that I am lucky enough to work with. We spoke at length about a program called Community-Based Management of Acute Malnutrition (CMAM) that she was interested in implementing in the Millennium Villages. At that time, I was increasingly involved with the UNICEF team on the development of RapidSMS. CMAM struck me as a great example of medical system that we could support with technology. I wanted to avoid the trap of creating a use case around a technology that we were keen to deploy. As a result, RapidResponse was originally designed to provide support for the management of a CMAM program deployed primarily by Community Health Workers (CHWs). It has since morphed to include support for malaria and diarrhea screening two other major killers of children under five in Africa.

What excites me most about RapidResponse, besides the impact I hope it will have in health, is that it begins to show us the full potential and range of application that an SMS based approach with server-side logic can provide. RapidResponse is more than just data collection providing decision-tree based diagnosis support, workflow management, and core messaging services. It helps automate and facilitate and coordinate the activities of field based health care staff and supports a powerful alert system that has the potential to help reduce gaps in treatment.

RapidResponse is very much a collaborative effort between a number of groups and individuals who have all contributed tremendously to the progress made thus far. The UNICEF Innovations Team have been fully engaged with this project from the offset and have provided along with many other things generous programming support. Their continued engagement will be key to RapidResponse’s growth. Also highly influential was the incredible work of a group of SIPA students from Columbia University, who showed that RapidSMS could effectively be used to monitor malnutrition in children in Malawi. Working closely in particular with Ray Short and Sean Blaschke, we incorporated the needs of their system and what we were developing for MVP into a single, unified malnutrition monitoring platform. Special thanks are due to the MVP Health team and in particular to Dr. James Wariero and Saleena Subaiya who provided the on-the-ground insight of the how the system should work. Jessica Fanzo and Roger Sodjinou, the nutrition and malnutrition treatment experts, provided guidance in developing the system around the CMAM protocol. Lastly, thanks are due Schuyler Erle and Andy McKay who transformed concepts into code, and the growing RapidSMS open source programmer community who have built the pieces to make all of this possible.

I realize developing a system is meaningless if we can’t show impact. We are in the initial faces of piloting RapidResponse to support the delivery of CMAM by CHWs in one of our sites in Kenya. While the pilot is in its early stages, I am encouraged by the initial results that we hope to be able to share through updates in the upcoming months.

In the mean time, our hope is to continue to build RapidResponse as an open mHealth platform that will ultimately enable partners in the field to deliver health services more effectively and efficiently. Our hope is to build a flexible platform around which a coalition of partners can coalesce and to which they can contribute. Through the actual implementation of projects in the field, we are hoping to drive resources into the further development and refinement of a system that will benefit all partners. We envision a system that is flexible enough for any group to customize to their individual use case (there will always be the need) and that will eventually be easy enough to configure (via web interface) that grass route groups or government agencies with limited resources could deploy on their own. We realize this is a grand vision (and we’re not the first with this aim) but we feel that by taking an open approach we’ve started to put together a solid foundation, both from a technical and partner standpoint, to make this possible.

RapidResponse Malnutrition Report

For a complete technical overview please visit the RapidResponse project page on www.rapidsms.org

C-Cell Mobile Phone Charging in Ghana

Jun 24, 2009 Africa, Ghana, Innovation, Mobile, Power, Solar

Nana Owusu Acheampongs C-Cell Cell Phone Charger

Nana Owusu Acheampong's C-Cell Phone Charger

Kevin Rehak, an MBA Student at Columbia University that I am working with, recently sent me this photo of an innovative approach to cell phone charging in Ghana. Using a charging system he made himself, Mr. Acheampong, one of the Abusuapanin Community Leader’s in Bonsaaso village, use’s 4 C dry cell batteries to charge mobile phones. The four 1.5V batteries in series adds up to 6V which is similar to the 5.5V that most cell phones require (amperage varies). The set of batteries cost 1 Ghana Cedi and he is able to charge four phones before needing to replace the batteries. This compares to the 1 Cedi cost of charging a phone at the local cell tower.

Obviously, for a number of reasons this solution is not ideal. The phones charge very quickly (~10 minutes) but are probably receiving too high of a current which damages batteries. From an environmental standpoint, this method is particularly wasteful. All this is to highlight both the huge demand for cell phone charging in rural areas in Africa and a general lack of cheap and efficient technologies available for entrepreneurs like Mr. Acheampong.

Tough Stuff Solar Panel

Luckily, a lot of new products are beginning to enter the market that should help change this. The Tough Stuff Solar Panel a 1W (5.6V, 174mA) highly robust, amorphous panel that is ideal for charging individual cell phones is a particularly exciting example of this. More important then spec, the Tough Stuff Panel (with cell connectors) comes in at about €10 or less per panel retail. The retail price will obviously have to be a bit more but if you consider existing charging practices (see above) even a $20 price-point seems very viable.

Also see related post on 12V Cell Phone Charging Practices in Mali

LED Lights and 12V Cell Phone Charging Mali

Apr 28, 2009 Africa, ICT4D, Mali, Mobile, Technology

Inspired by Jan Chipcase, I put together the following photo montage covering the ever increasing number of cheap Chinese LED lights that are transforming the way people access lighting. There are a lot of amazing NGOs doing work to address the issue of rural household lighting but I think they are at best a fill-gap to an existing market gap. The mass market solution (LED + small rechargeable battery + 1 W solar panel) that will really make a difference will be Chinese and at a price that will encourage extremely fast adoption rates. This is evident from the introduction of LED flashlights in Mali that completely took over the market in less then six months.

I also document the common way most cell phone charging is done in an off-grid environment. While it may not the be the most power efficient or battery safe method it works and is both cheap to the supplier and consumer. Used car batteries you can see are the “power lines” in a lot of African villages that form the basis of distributed power distribution.

12V Mali Photo Montage (sorry for the large file size 10.4MB)

Rapid Android (RapidSMS) Launched on Android!

Feb 12, 2009 ICT, Mobile, News, SMS, Travel

Today UNICEF’s Innovation Group in partnership with Dimagi has just announced the launch of Rapid Android a mobile data collection and SMS messaging system, for the Android platform. RapidSMS has gotten a lot of well deserved, positive attention for being the technology behind Columbia University’s and UNICEF’s amazing Child Malnutrition and Surveillance and Famine Response project which recently won the USAID Innovation Challenge.

Rapid Android is so exciting because it represents the first time (at least that I know of) where a phone can now be used not only as a data entry tool but a data aggregation platform. A hybrid – bot SMS Gateway server AND client; traditional technical lines are beginning to blur as our the types of applications we can hosting on a phone.

Rapid Android should make deploying field based SMS data collections systems both easier and more affordable. Previously, deploying RapidSMS required a computer with Linux, a compatible phone or GPRS modem and someone with the technical chops to be able to install RapidSMS and its many dependencies.

Some advantages of Rapid Android include:

price – available on any android phone ($400) and only getting cheaper. Android on netbooks makes this even more exciting.
power – a phone requires requires much less power, can be charged from 12V, has a built in UPS (battery)
portability – having a battery makes it portable, you don’t need a physical location (just a person) where to host it. Rapid Android phones can be easily shipped for deployment minimizing the need for a technical person on the deployment side
data entry – ideal data entry device with touch screen, keyboard and form based error correction

Rapid Android includes many of the original features of RapidSMS including::

ability to bulk send and receive sms to groups of people
data collection via SMS forms which are editable on the phone
local data entry using standard SDK Android forms
view and aggregate data from incoming SMS messages
plot data in graphs and export via excel over a wifi link

RapidAndroid is not a web server and currently can’t be used to host forms which could be accessed from a remote computer yet. This is a very powerful feature that hopefully we’ll see later.

Rapid Android is a result of a collaboration between UNICEF and Dimagi an initiative that came out of the Open Mobile Consortium. Rapid Android was developed primarily by Daniel Myung and Cory Zue at Dimagi with support from the UNICEF Innovation team. Rapid Android is free and open source and now available at: http:www.rapidandroid.org.

For more info on RapidSMS, a review I wrote for MobileActive is available here.

Finally some screen shots!