With its ubiquity and mobility, mobile phone shows high potential in community development.
Open Mobile Consortium reviews GeoChat and JavaROSA:
GeoChat is a flexible open source group communications technology that lets team members interact to maintain shared geospatial awareness of who is doing what where — over any device, on any platform, over any network. GeoChat allows you and your team to stay in touch one another in a variety of ways: over SMS, over email, and on the surface of a map in a web browser.
Examples of GeoChat applications are disease surveillance and community healthcare, with possibility to be used in diaster relief as well (provided that mobile phone network is still working, or being ad-hoc-ly setted up on the site). There’re already several sites in Mekong sub-region that deployed GeoChat for disease surveillance, including Mukdahan-Savannakhet (Thailand-Laos) border area. Technical works on two pilot sites are supported by Mekong Basin Disease Surveillance (MBDS), InSTEDD, and Opendream. InSTEDD also houses an R&D lab in Phnom Penh for regional developments.
Apart from field communications, data collection is essential for fieldwork. JavaROSA, a project of OpenROSA, is an open-source platform for data collection on mobile devices. It is based on the W3C’s XForms standard.
JavaROSA has been designed for a wide and ever increasing variety of applications including taking survey data, following disease management, guiding health workers through treatment protocols at point of care, and collection of longitudinal medical records. JavaROSA’s framework architecture is flexible and modular, allowing the development of wholly new applications with minimal new code.
JavaROSA is being used in a project that support community health workers with their data collection tasks during home visits with patients.
