Field Testing EpiCollect in Tanzania

Field testing Androids

View more presentations from Nick Short.

Bloomsbury Media Cloud goes live!

A joint Bloomsbury initiative to create a "Cloud" based media resource funded by JISC.

Example videos:

Samsung Galaxy Tablet

We have just purchased the Samsung Galaxy Tablet which has just come out in the UK. The device is a clear competitor for the Apple iPad but has the clear advantage for mobile surveillance of a SIM card slot allowing mobile data and voice calls. So far we have been pretty impressed by the quality and functionality of the device. It also seems a good platform for our mobile learning resources. More later ...

There is good comparison of the Galaxy and the iPad available here:

Tanzanian collaboration

Dr Esron Karimuribo and Mr Eric Beda from the SACIDS project on a visit from Tanzania. They met with colleagues at the RVC, Imperial College, IoE, Open Air Radio, Wellcome Trust and the LIDC to discuss the use of mobiles for surveillance and m-learning. They have now been using EpiCollect for the last 6 months successfully in the field.

Check out these videos of the new Indian Android tablet - I came across these on the excellent blog by Geoff Stead of Tribal.

Presentation on mobile technology at AMEE 2010

Using smartphones to support veterinary projects in East Africa

Background
Recent developments in smartphones and the Android operating system provide a powerful new mobile platform. In Africa, this has the potential to transform access to information and enhance sharing of knowledge in the most remote areas.

Summary of work
An initial pilot project adapted the Google Open Data Kit running on G1 mobile phones to collect cattle disease data in Zanzibar. The devices were also used to communicate through voice, blogs, text, email and twitter. Subsequently a larger project is testing the use of this system to deliver educational video, wikis and text to rural users.

Summary of results
Initial results indicate that smartphones are seen as an easier way of collecting, accessing and sharing information in the field.

Conclusions
There are many opportunities to use smartphones in the developing world to support health services

Take-home message
The open source Android operating system and more affordable handsets has the potential to transform mobile learning.

Press release on Android phones use in Kenya for vaccination surveillance

Maasai Vets Carry Out Disease Surveillance of 86,000 Animals With Google Mobile Phones

05 August 2010

Mobile phones enable vets to upload information about diseases and vaccinations (shown by the coloured markers) to a project website. Credit: EpiCollect

Maasai vets in East Africa are using mobile phones to monitor diseases including anthrax and rabies as part of a partnership involving London-based academics. The Google mobile phones are helping to record how diseases are spreading in order to bolster preventative action, including vaccination campaigns. The new project in rural Kenya is led by the charityVetaid and is backed by Google UK, which has donated 23 G1 Android devices to the surveillance effort. Data relating to more than 86,000 animals from 1,600 farms has already been logged via the mobile phones in the last month.

Deadly diseases, versatile phonesThe vets and community animal health workers are using the phones in the Kajiado district, central Kenya. The project relies upon the software EpiCollect - a mobile data collection tool which has been loaded onto the devices and was created by researchers from Imperial College London. EpiCollect allows the vets to upload their findings to a central website which plots where diseases are occurring.  A wide range of diseases are being monitored: the deadly cattle disease East Coast Fever; anthrax and rabies, which affect both animals and humans; Peste des Petits Ruminants (PPR), which affects sheep and goats; and foot and mouth disease – a potentially fatal disease affecting cattle, sheep, goats and pigs. The phones have also been  loaded with a range of educational resources, including photos and videos, for veterinary fieldworkers.

 

Veterinary perspectives

Dr Gabriel Turasha, a Maasai vet and the regional coordinator for Vetaid in East Africa, is leading the surveillance teams. He said: “The mobile phones are really improving real time access to information. You can send a message to report an outbreak. There is better communication and their role in today’s society is very crucial.” His colleague Dr Ezra Saitoti, a Maasai vet working in Kenya for Vetaid, added: “I am very optimistic that we can contain further spread of these diseases. If you can pinpoint the location of the problem, and we are able to do that with the phones, you will be able to come up with a proper solution.” Nick Short, a founder of Vetaid and Head of eMedia at theRoyal Veterinary College, added: “Mobile phones are now commonplace in Africa and their use for disease monitoring and control can provide enormous benefits to animal and human health in the future."

 

Software developer's perspective

Dr David Aanensen one of the researchers behind EpiCollect from Imperial College London, said: “We’re really excited that our software is being put to such good use in East Africa. We hope our tool will help the vets and farmers get a much clearer picture of the diseases that are affecting their animals. Ultimately, this should make it easier for them to treat these diseases – either directly or through vaccination - and to target resources where they are most needed.”

The disease monitoring mobile phone project is a collaboration between Vetaid, the Royal Veterinary College, Imperial College London, the Institute of Education and LIDC.

EpiCollect goes Live!

The EpiCollect platform developed by David Aanensen and his team at Imperial College has just been launched. An Android based version is available for download from the Android market. There is also an iPhone version which can be downloaded from the iTunes site.

EpiCollect.net provides a web application for the generation of forms and freely hosted project websites (using Google's AppEngine) for many kinds of mobile data collection projects.

Data can be collected using multiple mobile phones running either the Android Operating system or the iPhone (using the EpiCollect mobile app) and all data can be synchronized from the phones and viewed centrally (using Google Maps) via the Project website or directly on the phones.

Find out more about how you can use this application from the www.epicollect.net web site.

Innovatons in mobile phone applicatons for health and educaton in East Africa

Niall Winters 1, Nick Short 2, David Aanensen 3 and Andrew Hagner 2

1 London Knowledge Lab, 2 Royal Veterinary College, 3 Imperial College

Full presentation

Africa has the world's highest mobile phone growth rate and as such this technology has great potential for supporting human development (Winters and Toyama, 2009).However, determining how to support African mobile users in their own socio-cultural contexts remains under-researched.

In this paper, we present our on-going research in East Africa in the areas of veterinary health and education. We focus on how mobile phone interventions can support current practice and can lead to new ones. The communities we work with are veterinarians and veterinary assistants based in rural settings in Zanzibar and Northern Tanzania.

The first stage of the project was to determine the role new “smartphone” applications could play in animal health surveillance. We thus undertook a 3-week field trial in Unguja using Google’s Open Data Kit (ODK) running on the Android platform. Veterinary staff from the Department of Livestock Development and students from the RVC Undergraduate Research Team collected data on the physical examination of cattle. Findings suggest that the ODK was preferred to pen-and paper based collection, primarily because of time saved when transferring the data to a spreadsheet.

In parallel with this work, we investigated how social software can be integrated into in-situ everyday veterinary practice. In particular, we found that Twitter and Google Chat were primarily used to support in-field communication and logistics between veterinary teams. At a secondary level, the lightweight nature of the communication enabled close co-ordination between students in the field and faculty based in the UK. As an extension of the above, we are working on the participatory development of mobile data collection platform for developing regions based on EpiCollect (Aanensen et al., 2009) and are developing associated training initiatives for practitioners using the software, building on the work of Mor and Winters (2008).

The final, and most recent research challenge we are investigating are the ways in which mobile technologies can support sharing and reflection upon practice. Our aim is to co-design and develop a sustainable open knowledge exchange network, termed OpenKXnet, where practitioners can discuss and share information about infectious disease detection, identification, and management (DIM) practices entirely using their mobile phones. Veterinarians and vet assistants will develop their own open educational resources (OERs), recorded in the Swahili and we will evaluate how they are used to learn about the DIM of infectious diseases.

References

• Aanensen DM, Huntley DM, Feil EJ, al-Own F, Spratt BG, 2009 EpiCollect: Linking Smartphones to Web Applications for Epidemiology, Ecology and Community Data Collection. PLoS ONE 4(9): e6968. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0006968
• Mor, Y. and Winters, N. (2008). Participatory design in open education: a workshop model for developing a pattern language. Journal of Interactive Media in Education. http://jime.open.ac.uk/2008/13/
• Winters, N. and Toyama, K. (2009) Human-Computer Interaction for Development: Mapping the Terrain, Information Technology and International Development, 5(4), iii-viii. http://itidjournal.org/itid/article/view/419/187

Podcast on veterinary use of mobile phones in pastoral communities

Dr Ezra Saitoti and Dr Paul Chacha, both from the charity Vetaid, Dr Musiany Kisipan, University of Nairobi, and Bev Panto, Royal Veterinary College address the challenges affecting livestock within pastoralist communities, explain an exciting project to monitor disease by using mobile phones, and discuss online learning. Recorded at the London International Development Centre for Development Matters.

• Link to Podcast
• Link to LIDC Development Matters
• Link to Vetaid

Android phone comaprisons

Review of Nexus 1 and Desire phones running Android from Slashgear.com




Comparison of Google Nexus 1 and Apple 3G iPhone

Photos from the visit of African vets

Visitors tour the RVC with Bev Panto

Collecting mobile phones at Google

At Imperial College programming the Google phones

Recording a podcast at the Open Air studio

On the farm!

Visit by East African vets to UK

The RVC is hosting a visit by three veterinary colleagues from Tanzania and Kenya. Dr Paul Chacha works with Vetaid in Tanzania, Dr Saitoti Kotonto from Vetaid in Kenya and Dr Mosiany Kisipan.

Paul, Saitoti and Kispian at the RVC Hawkshead

As part of their visit, they are testing the use of the EpiCollect platform for animal disease surveillance in East Africa. Using G1 Android phones donated by Google (see earlier post) they have started mapping their travels around London on a Google Map.

Meeting with Alison Edelshain from LCH who funded the visit of the African vets

Google UK donates second hand mobiles to Vetaid

Google staff in the UK have started to donate their G1 Android phones as they upgrade to the lastest Nexus phone. Today 23 of these were kindly donated to the Androids for Africa project for use by Vetaid in Kenya. They will be loaded with the EpiCollect application and a range of educational media for use by veterinary fieldworkers to monitor vaccination campaigns and provide access to veterinary educational resources.

Guy Collender (LIDC), Bev Panto (RVC), Niall  (IoE) and David Aanensen (Imperial College)

at Google prior to collecting the G1 phones

New UK Government funding for Media Cloud

The Bloomsbury Colleges led by the RVC has just received funding from the UK Government to develop a "media cloud" with a specific focus on international development. The 15-month initiative involves six internationally renowned institutions within the University of London (Birkbeck, Institute of Education, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Royal Veterinary College, School of Oriental and African Studies, and The School of Pharmacy). It is being undertaken in collaboration with the London International Development Centre – an academic organisation which brings together social and natural scientists to facilitate interdisciplinary research and training.

The project is funded by £87,709 from JISC - a UK Government body which develops partnerships to enable the UK education and research communities to engage in national and global collaborations. Innovative internet-based approaches are central to the project, including the storage of digital resources in ‘the cloud’ – a virtual space online.

Material generated by the project will include:

Programmes on key international development topics, including:

o        Access to medicines

o        Animal and human health (including bird flu and swine flu)

o        Climate change

o        Future of the Millennium Development Goals

o        Water resources

Specially commissioned programmes to coincide with major events in the international development calendar, including:

o        International Women’s Day, 8 March

o        World Tuberculosis Day, 24 March

o        Peace one day, 21 September

o        World AIDS Day, 1 December

Short presentations profiling the international development expertise and training offered by the Bloomsbury Colleges within various categories, including:

o        Health and health promotion

o        Food production and security

o        Environment and biodiversity

o        Rural development

o        Water and sanitation

o        Education

o        Sustainable development

The intention is to make these cloud hosted resources available through an open portal. They will then be accessible to students anywhere in the world. Of particular significance to this blog though is the plan to tailor some of these resources for use on mobile phones in the developing world. Revisit this blog regularly for more details....

Drought in Naroosara, Kenya

Guardian blog on mobiles in Africa

Are mobile phones Africa's silver bullet?

Whether it's checking market prices of crops, transferring money or simply making a call, mobile phones are transforming Africa. But could this new technology end up bypassing the poorest?

Link to blog

Images from Tanzania

Return from Tanzania

We have just returned from a week in Tanzania to discuss the use of mobile phones for animal and human disease surveillance. The first part of the visit involved a workshop organised by the Southern African Centre for Infectious Disease Surveillance in Arusha. This was followed by meetings and field visits with Vetaid in the Ngorongoro Crater Area.

Vetaid project in Siminjaro, Tanzania

This work has been funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and includes the development of disease surveillance tools running on Android based mobile phones and the creation of educational content which can be accessed on the phone itself.

 Delegates at the Arusha Conference

This work is being carried out in partnership with Imperial College, the London Knowledge Lab, the London International Development Centre and the RVC e-Media Unit.

Educational veterinary videos on the mobile

We have been working on creating a range of veterinary educational videos in Swahilli. Here is an early example: