The potential of mobile phones as a platform has led a number of different groups to develop independent software solutions for capturing health data and providing decision support solutions in developing nations. Dimagi, along with a number of partners, has helped to lead the charge for the consolidation of development effort into these software solutions as a founding member of the OpenROSA consortium. The consortium's goal is to reduce the duplication of development, and provide open source tools for mobile data collection that are as robust and usable as possible.
Dimagi has been hard at work with its OpenROSA partners pioneering the development of JavaROSA. JavaROSA is a powerful j2me framework for data collection that conforms to the OpenROSA standards. 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.
Dimagi is currently leading development for a JavaROSA implementation for a patient triage protocol for use in Tanzania. JavaROSA is also being used as the mobile data collection front end in a field test for GATHER in Uganda.
