by Justin Sitter on 28 September 2010
Project Summary
Afrisis was contracted to develop a J2ME application support by the OpenRosa consortium, called JavaRosa. The task leveraged on pre-existing knowledge in J2ME development pushed to the next level of standards and best practices. The main goal of the project was to develop a new generic application that could leverage the latest version of the JavaRosa library to implement a general mobile surveying j2me application compliant to the OpenRosa standard, targeted to lower end devices. The application was successfully developed in the contracted time frame and a 1.0 alpha release is already available to the worldwide community for evaluation. The application aims to be a basic j2me client for the Javarosa-core XForms engine that can be used in a wide variety of situations. In the current release, the features are: Form Entry, Interactive form downloading from server; Form submission; Complete Internationalization support (in both the application and XForms themselves); Multimedia support (audio + images in XForms); Fully OpenRosa Compatible.
In addition, Afrisis has support quality assurance and testing in mobile data collection on the Open Data Kit (ODK) platform running on Android Phones. The project involved both stress and logic testing; the tasks provided new exposure to the Android phone environment. That project triggered different Afrisis internal projects on researching Android as platform for delivering services upon that might be further developed in the future.
In both projects highly expert Dimagi staff was assigned to work in partnership with Afrisis wich contributed with invaluable mentorship and deep technical insights. This collaboration helped the company to get a deeper understanding of mobile development state of the art tools and technologies that can make a notable contribution to the Mozambique local IT ecosystem.
Company Summary
AfriSis Lda. is a startup company created in 2007 to provide innovative products and consultancy services on software development in Mozambique.
The vision of the company is to provide the market with the best possible solution and services, contributing to the enhancement of software development and implementation. We plan on achieving this aim exposed in terms of vision by being on the cutting edge of IT research and development.
Our clients list range from various Mozambique Ministries, Telco related companies, financial institutions, research institutes (both private and government institutes) and leading NGO’s in both health and socio-economic areas.
Afrisis has developed and deployed end to end(mobile, touch-screen kiosks, sms’s, desktop, web) software solutions across all provinces of Mozambique.
Programmers are also actively involved in open source initiatives in micro finance (Mifos) and mobile health (JavaRosa) submitting code, patches, support, localization and other contributes to the community. Other side interests of the staff include regular participation in topcoder algorithm competition, robocup 2D team development and data mining.
by Matt on 13 September 2010
Ten blank, staring faces answered my question for me, ‘Who has ever used a computer before?’
It took some thought, a bit of trial and error, some creativity, and lots of patience during my first week of trainings in Zambia.
We are installing a data entry system using touch screen computers in rural Zambian clinics. The touch screen is connected to a server that uses the local cell network to communicate with a central server in the capital, relaying messages back and forth between clinics and the cell phones of Community Health Workers (CHWs) – members of the community trained in basic first aid and health care, who walk or bike between villages referring the sick to the clinic and following up with patients sent home from the clinic to find out whether or not they got better. The week encompassed training both the clinic workers on entering paper forms into a touch screen computer, and teaching CHWs how to use their phone to electronically record referrals and follow ups.
Many of those attending the trainings traveled incredible distances – biking up to 25km one way from home – getting up at 4am to be somewhere by 7:30am – hoping to get a meal or some sort of sustenance at the training session. Early morning energy and enthusiasm quickly faded mid afternoon as people started thinking about the journey home and their stomachs began to grumble. This left a short window within which to train. I discovered that a large chunk of the window on the first day needed to be dedicated to introductions, games, ice breakers, or anything that gets people involved, willing to ask questions, or happy to share their thoughts. Used to rote learning, I was not going to teach a class of parrots: “Repeat after me…” Breaking this habit, if for only one or two days, was challenging, to say the least.
I thought it would help speaking the national language – English. My opaquely thick American accent, however, often drew blank looks until my words were translated from American English to Zambian English – or Nyanja – or Bemba – or Tonga depending on the trainees origins. I found that I needed to get creative.
To illustrate the term guinea pig, I created the analogy of an extremely dirty local rodent, and testing a new soap. If the soap cleaned the rodent, it worked. If the rodent remained dirty, the soap was a failure. Seeing those ‘aha’ moments makes it completely worth it – and hopefully I didn’t unintentionally give the impression animal testing isn’t overly abundant back home…
I explained a computer network as a spider’s web, with the spider knowing where each of 10 flies on the web were located and whether they were ready to be eaten or not. This was our central server communicating via the ‘web’ to each of the clinics.
I used the age old ice breaker of spelling your name with your hips.
All in all – I think everyone left the training sessions enriched, myself included. There is now a growing cadre of tech savvy Zambians, at first afraid to touch a touch screen computer. Hopefully they learned something valuable, both in terms of using technology to make their jobs easier, and how to use it to improve health outcomes in rural Zambia.
by Matt on
Ten blank, staring faces answered my question for me, ‘Who has ever used a computer before?’
It took some thought, a bit of trial and error, some creativity, and lots of patience during my first week of trainings in Zambia.
We are installing a data entry system using touch screen computers in rural Zambian clinics. The touch screen is connected to a server that uses the local cell network to communicate with a central server in the capital, relaying messages back and forth between clinics and the cell phones of Community Health Workers (CHWs) – members of the community trained in basic first aid and health care, who walk or bike between villages referring the sick to the clinic and following up with patients sent home from the clinic to find out whether or not they got better. The week encompassed training both the clinic workers on entering paper forms into a touch screen computer, and teaching CHWs how to use their phone to electronically record referrals and follow ups.
Many of those attending the trainings traveled incredible distances - biking up to 25km one way from home – getting up at 4am to be somewhere by 7:30am – hoping to get a meal or some sort of sustenance at the training session. Early morning energy and enthusiasm quickly faded mid afternoon as people started thinking about the journey home and their stomachs began to grumble. This left a short window within which to train. I discovered that a large chunk of the window on the first day needed to be dedicated to introductions, games, ice breakers, or anything that gets people involved, willing to ask questions, or happy to share their thoughts. Used to rote learning, I was not going to teach a class of parrots: “Repeat after me…” Breaking this habit, if for only one or two days, was challenging, to say the least.
I thought it would help speaking the national language – English. My opaquely thick American accent, however, often drew blank looks until my words were translated from American English to Zambian English – or Nyanja – or Bemba – or Tonga depending on the trainees origins. I found that I needed to get creative.
To illustrate the term guinea pig, I created the analogy of an extremely dirty local rodent, and testing a new soap. If the soap cleaned the rodent, it worked. If the rodent remained dirty, the soap was a failure. Seeing those ‘aha’ moments makes it completely worth it – and hopefully I didn’t unintentionally give the impression animal testing isn’t overly abundant back home…
I explained a computer network as a spider’s web, with the spider knowing where each of 10 flies on the web were located and whether they were ready to be eaten or not. This was our central server communicating via the ‘web’ to each of the clinics.
I used the age old ice breaker of spelling your name with your hips.
All in all – I think everyone left the training sessions enriched, myself included. There is now a growing cadre of tech savvy Zambians, at first afraid to touch a touch screen computer. Hopefully they learned something valuable, both in terms of using technology to make their jobs easier, and how to use it to improve health outcomes in rural Zambia.
by Rowena Luk on 9 September 2010
BlackBerry Dictations
With the BlackBerry Dictation application, phsyicians can capture audio notes on their BlackBerry devices and have them automatically transcribed and appended to a patient’s medical record.
In the fast-paced environment of some of Boston’s busiest hospitals, it’s difficult to walk the line between keeping complete medical records while squeezing in precious face time with every patient. This is particularly difficult for specializations such as orthopaedic surgery, where a clinician is often on the wards or in the operating room for much of the day, and not in front of a computer.
To help address this problem, Dimagi is working with Boston Medical Center (BMC) to develop a BlackBerry dictation application. This system is integrated with the hospital information systems so that a clinician can record a note and have it automatically transcribed and appended to a given medical record, even while he’s still walking around the hospitals wards. In fact, the device keeps track of which patients are in which bed on each floor, so that the doctor can easily pull up pertinent information on his device as he is doing the rounds. All this data is securely captured and transmitted using BlackBerry’s secure infrastructure.
by Rowena Luk on
CommCare Afghanistan
Strengthening community health programs to support illiterate and low-literate health workers using multimedia on low-cost mobile phones.
Working with World Vision, Dimagi is currently developing a Pregnancy, Newborn, and Postpartum module for use by community health workers in Western Afghanistan. Apart from the challenges of working in a post-conflict zone, this project presents unique considerations with regards to literacy and gender, which directly impact when and how mobile phones can be most helpful. For example, many of the female health workers have never had a chance to go to school, and are at a particular disadvantage with regards to learning, recalling, and educating others about critical health practices. In this vein, Dimagi is extending the CommCare platform in a new direction, to support audio and visual prompts which will make it possible for illiterate and low-literate health workers to learn, share, and collect information.
Health workers are presented with a culturally-appropriate icon, which prompts questions about danger signs, interventions, and preventative health practices. For further context, they can press a button on the mobile phone which will deliver a local-language audio prompt loud enough for her to play this information to mothers and children in the community. While this tool helps her to make sure she covers all the relevant topics and recommends appropriate interventions, it is also collecting data about the community and the visits which can be relayed back to supervisors and managers.
Integrating audio and visual prompts has opened up an exciting realm of possibilities for CommCare.
- Audio prompts are not confined to the limited screen size of the visual prompts. Audio prompts, supplementing icons or text, can provide more contextual information, the ‘why’ and the ‘how’ about community health interventions.
- A cell phone keypad or screen is targeted at one person, the user of the cell phone. However, initial assessments of CHWs using these phones during site visits reveals that the audio prompt immediately makes the experience of using the phone more inclusive. Instead of a screen which only the CHWs can see, other members of the community can now hear the same message. This presents an interesting opportunity to target specific health education messages directly to communities of any literacy level, while reinforcing the lessons that the CHWs are trying to spread.
- With images, or even videos, on the phone, it is now possible to draw in the influence of local figureheads, who can advocate for better health practices with greater authority and influence. Particularly with young, female CHWs, who may face resistance from senior male members of the community, the pictures and video has helped to strengthen their voices in the community.
