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