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Archive for the ‘SMS’ Category

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

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!