SMS platforms are getting more feature-wealthy. Many have already included Interactive Voice reaction (IVR) era that permit for interactive voice calls, casting off literacy boundaries. some SMS structures have also all started shifting past easy SMS messaging to facts-primarily based messaging platforms like WhatsApp, facebook Messenger and Viber. these statistics-based messaging structures allow for extra strong interplay and information collection and now have the delivered benefit of not needing to setup an SMS gateway and/or negotiate shortcodes. look for in addition integration of these functions into conventional text messaging platforms and interventions in the year(s) to come back.
App-based totally platforms have historically struggled at outward-facing facts series. A fantastic exception is made possible by Enketo, a web form provider this is able to hook up with many all rightplatforms like Kobo Toolbox and io to allow many (however not all) of the benefits of app-based facts series, which include offline facts series, GPS functionality and multimedia, in a browser-primarily based internet form.
Dimagi’s broadly-used CommCare platform has started to bridge this hole more comprehensively than another single platform. in the beginning conceived of as a characteristic-wealthy fork of ODK (maximum notably such as case capability which allowed data for a single document to be accumulated and changed over time), in recent years they have brought CommCare Messaging (a way to accumulate statistics through SMS or IVR using forms created for his or her app) and extra lately, internet Apps (a way to acquire facts via web bureaucracy that mimic their local Android app).
information and analysis
earlier this month the Finnish cell cellphone maker, Nokia, introduced that they may be re-releasing an up to date version of their mythical 3310 GSM phone. since it was first released within the early 2000s, the Nokia 3310 has won a cult following for its remarkable sturdiness, long battery lifestyles and compact design providing an inner antenna. Many Europeans and americans fondly recollect the 3310 as their first cell cellphone, a device that made assembly up with buddies in a crowd less complicated and a tool that provided limitless hours of leisure with the undying sport Snake.
in the developing global, but, the Nokia 3310 changed into a lifeline. owning a reliable, long lasting communications device that would go days without charging intended that hundreds of thousands of people could connect to relatives and buddies in approaches they never could before. via the mid-2000s, the unfold of telephones just like the 3310 in the developing world allowed governments and NGOs to attain large swaths of the populace with game-changing speed and performance. the use of cellular phones and devices to supply health offerings have become called mHealth, or “cellular fitness,” although the proliferation of cell gadgets has been leveraged throughout many fields consisting of agriculture, governance and finance.
mobile technology has absolutely changed since the 3310 version changed into released in 2000, as have the ways in which mobile technology is used to reach and supply offerings to marginalized populations in the course of the growing global. The re-release of this important piece of hardware appears as accurate a time as any, then, to reflect on the present and destiny of this growing discipline.
shifting from SMS to voice and information (and returned once more)
SMS text messaging has lengthy been the most straightforward and cost-efficient manner of directly reaching populations via cell devices. The Nokia 3310 made massive upgrades in consumer enjoy with the addition of phonebook capability and a T9 predictive textual content keyboard. In latest years, but, the rapid expansion of 2G and 3G availability has mixed with more and more cheap function phones and smartphones to allow for sturdy app-based data collection.
App-based facts series offers the capability for enumerators to accumulate GPS and multimedia statistics, in addition to appoint complicated pass and repeat common sense. but those apps also pose technical obstacles beyond just finding a dependable records connection—downloading, configuring and the use of an app for records series is mostly a complicated technique that is not viable for populace-level records collection. while systems like Open information package (ODK), CommCare and MagPi permit educated enumerators and network health workers to reliably gather a wide range of health records, in most cases those systems aren't feasible to set up as outward-going through answers to huge, numerous populations. At the other stop of the spectrum, SMS platforms like TextIt and Telerivet have evolved to include pass common sense and statistics validation, but there stay limits to what records can be communicated and amassed within the confines of a a hundred and forty-character text message, in particular whilst as compared against app-based structures.
There’s a running comic story in mHealth that, for decades, agencies that applied mHealth solutions as a part of their applications did so simplest so that they may use a image of a domestically-based enumerator or CHW holding up a dusty old Nokia 3310 that they'd just used to collect a few vital piece of statistics. Of direction, that’s an exceptionally cynical comic story, and one that’s in most cases unfaithful. but there's a few reality there, no longer inside the cynical sense (I’ve never worked with an corporation who just wanted the picture op), however within the feel that many mHealth providers and practitioners have centered on data series at the cost of well timed analysis and reporting.
This isn’t to say that mHealth programs have finished not anything with the facts they've accrued. To the opposite, records gathered from mHealth interventions are making sizable variations on almost every continent. where the space lies, however, is inside the mechanisms for evaluation and reporting. even as huge paintings has been undertaken to package deal analysis and data visualization with cell facts collection, a number of the maximum beneficial equipment have not begun to be integrated with records collection:
Excel, perhaps the maximum broadly used analysis and reporting tool in mHealth, has long been used to manipulate and talk raw statistics and outcomes. In a sense it’s grow to be a lingua franca for the digital international, especially given its significant use for the duration of the growing and advanced international. but, it struggles with relational databases and dealing with longitudinal facts units (within the words of an esteemed colleague, “in case you’re trying to increase a relational database in Excel with VBA, you’re doing it incorrect”).
conventional commercial enterprise Intelligence platforms like Qlik and Tableau are statistics systems constructed for organization use instances which could quick examine and visualize information in a way that is each aesthetically desirable and clean for non-statisticians to apprehend. Google’s information Studio is every other promising platform that has the ability to offer business enterprise-best analytics and system getting to know to a wider target market, beyond those who ought to historically have enough money/access legacy BI gear.
internet-primarily based analytic equipment, along with gear built the use of open-supply languages like R and Python, leverage the cloud for both complex evaluation and information visualization. chief amongst them is vivid, an R-based totally platform that lets in R-primarily based analysis to be displayed on user-pleasant net-primarily based dashboards.
The over-arching fashion right here is not that a selected platform or technique for analyzing mHealth facts is emerging as a dominant participant, however that the sector in preferred is spotting that it is actually no longer enough to gather difficult-to-get information. The maximum a success platforms and programs will will weight collection and analysis equally to obtain the end purpose of making an environment wherein collected records is used to pressure choices. To that cease, structures like Ona (who've embraced R) and CommCare (with their report Builder) are beforehand of the ball and main the way to an included mHealth environment that prioritizes the use of records equally with the collection of facts.
importance of layout
perhaps the maximum obvious and crucial trend in mHealth is that nearly each aspect, from development to information series to analysis, is turning into simpler and simpler to get admission to for the ones with out formal technical schooling (and with out large technical budgets!). 4 or five years ago, it'd were tough to construct an mHealth tool without a person to your crew understanding Django, XML, Python or other programming languages. Many, in reality maximum, of the equipment these days employ WYSIWYG (What you see Is What You Get) interfaces that allow non-technical customers to tug and drop their manner to complete mHealth apps without hiring expensive developers or mHealth experts.
expanded accessibility and lower development expenses are undeniably an awesome thing for ICT4D (information and Communications generation for improvement) however, to paraphrase a quote from both Voltaire or Spider man—with the strength of reasonably-priced and without problems on hand mHealth development tools comes the duty to design generation-based totally interventions in a manner this is appropriate to the use case (or to apprehend while a technical solution isn't always the right healthy). I used to shaggy dog story with college students that the most crucial ability for an mHealth professional is “how to say NO to someone who thinks they want an app but doesn’t understand their use case.”
For higher or worse, we’ve reached a point wherein there aren't any gatekeepers to mHealth—all of us who wants to build an app can. it's miles consequently vital that the stable fundamentals of cell improvement and deliberate, nicely-deliberate virtual development, are taught and endorsed. i take advantage of (and recommend others use) the following assets as a start line for virtual development:
principles for virtual development Created by means of a consortium of mHealth stakeholders, which include funders, NGOs, agencies and individuals, the standards for digital improvement are a set of pointers for creating digital gear and statistics structures. even as no longer every precept will observe to every project, and a few even seem to contradict themselves (as an instance, principle 1: layout With The user, need to constantly be balanced in opposition to precept 3: design For Scale), i have never labored on a assignment that did no longer gain from a factor-by using-point discussion of every of those standards.
design package Human centered design is crucial to any health intervention, however it’s specifically crucial for mHealth interventions—no longer simplest do you have to make certain that the content is appropriate to the person, however technical capability and efficacy have to additionally be considered in order that the content material can be accurately delivered to the user. Ideo’s design package is a collection of resources, such as techniques and case research to make sure that your intervention is not handiest designed with users in thoughts, however that the user is at the very center of the design process and that all programmatic and technical selections are viewed through the lens of how selections will ultimately have an effect on the stop consumer.
looking ahead
The future of mHealth is open—open access, open source, open records and open innovation. by no means inside the records of development have there been so many powerful tools and systems available to the ones who've historically been marginalized and excluded from the leading edge of generation and innovation. it is imperative, although, that these tools and technology are used intentionally and efficaciously, with a watch towards the cease consumer in a way that ensures lengthy-time period sustainability and improvement.
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