Fieldworkers began training on Monday and by 9 April 2011, over 150 will have been trained on how to use Mobile Researcher to conduct house-to-house enumerations on low cost mobile phones.

Working with international social development consulting firm Ayala Consulting, data collected using Mobile Researcher on over 25,000 households will be automatically incorporated into the information system utilising the Mobile Researcher application programming interface (API).

After facing significant logistical challenges using paper to capture 25,000 households initially, the Ministry took the decision to upgrade to mobile technology to streamline data collection and allow the recording of household locations via integrated GPS. The collection of household photographs as well as an image to identify the head of the household provides invaluable information for verification and follow up purposes.

Subsequent phases are planned to enumerate a further 150,000 households making this one of the largest census-type projects utilising low cost mobile phones known.

The API leverages Microsoft ADO .NET Data Services which currently supports exchanging entities using either JSON or ATOM (an XML-based feed format). Furthermore the API supports a rich query interface that supports filtering, sorting and query expansion. To find out more about the API and the functionality it supports, please refer to the Mobenzi Researcher API guide.

If you would like to find out more about the Mobenzi Researcher API or have any problems accessing it please feel free to send us an email at support@mobenzi.com.

Resources:

Mobenzi Researcher API Guide – Download

Until recently, the trigger mechanism only supported notifications of newly received submissions, however, we have now implemented the ability to notify your custom application(s) when a submission is edited in your research console as well – thereby maintaining data integrity between our systems and yours.

In both cases we have also improved the processing mechanism in terms of dealing with failed delivery. The submission trigger mechanism will now reprocess a trigger in the event of a delivery failure (such as network failure or your server being offline). This ultimately means you are always ensured of receiving a notification of a submission even if your processing application is down while a submission is received. The new processing mechanism will make up to 6 attempts to notify your application as per the following schedule (assuming failure of the first and subsequent requests):

• Retry 1 minute after first failure
• Retry 5 minutes after second failure
• Retry 20 minutes after third failure
• Retry 1 hour after fourth failure
• Retry 4 hours after fifth failure

If the result of the 6^th attempt is a failure, we will notify you via email and wait on a resolution before re-processing the undelivered notification(s).

A successful notification delivery is defined as an attempt that results in a “200 OK” HTTP status code being returned by the relevant web server. If any other code is returned our system will deem the delivery a failure and enter the reprocessing workflow as described above. Furthermore, if a “500 Internal Server Error” code is returned we will record the error message returned and supply this information to you in the event the notification is not delivered after 6 successive attempts.

In terms of the requirements for setting up a create/update notification trigger, we simply require the URL endpoint of your service and the survey ID you wish to setup the trigger(s) for. Once setup, the notification to your URL endpoint is simply made via a GET request with the following query string parameters.

On submission created notification:

On submission modified notification:

If you have any comments, questions or suggestions, please feel free to post them here, alternatively, please contact support.

We hope you find these new features useful.

The presentation will highlight the methodologies, strategies and technologies utilised in the design of the Good Start Management Console (GSMC). The GSMC is a web-based system which was built to leverage the Mobile Researcher Application Programming Interface (API) to allow the activities involved in a large-scale randomised control trial to be closely managed and monitored. Community Health Workers (CHWs) make use of low end mobile phones and complete simple surveys which are fed back directly to the GSMC.

Mark will be presenting the paper as I will be overseas, so if you’re in Johannesburg during those dates and are interested in health informatics, be sure to register – the conference is sure to have a number of insightful speakers and perspectives.

If you’d like to learn more about the GSMC, the case study is a good place to start.

Leveraging the Mobile Researcher API to integrate, automate and guide the processes involved in a multi-site, longitudinal clinical intervention project. Download the case study.

Organisation Profile

The South African Medical Research Council (MRC) is a statutory council mandated by government to improve the nation’s health and quality of life through promoting and conducting relevant and responsive health research.  As one of the largest research organisations in the country, the MRC is able to embark on large-scale long-term projects which break new ground in a range of areas including HIV/AIDS.

Project Scope

The MRC’s “Good Start” study focuses on interventions for the Prevention of Mother to Child Transmission (PMTCT) of HIV and strategies to improve neonatal survival.  The project involves over 40 members of staff and, over the course of its 3 year term, several thousand participants.

Following the successful completion of two preceding phases, participant recruitment of pregnant mothers residing in Umlazi, a township located outside Durban South Africa by Community-based Health Workers (CHWs) began in 2008. Consenting participants, randomly assigned to a control or intervention group based on their household location, receive antenatal and postnatal CHW visits with the view to assess the effectiveness of the intervention strategy.

Antenatal visit dates are based on the mother’s expected date of delivery.  Postnatal visits must take place at specific intervals dependent on the date on which the mother is discharged from her delivery facility.  Operational information from each visit is required which must be relayed to supervisors to facilitate planning and ensure adherence to the visit schedule.  Birth information must be gathered and disseminated immediately to allow for time-critical postnatal visits to take place on time.

The duration a participant remains active in the study varies between 3 and 12 months depending on when she was identified and enrolled.  Upon the completion of applicable visits, an assessment interview is held at Prince Mshiyeni Hospital in Umlazi with a data collector.

Complexities relating to participant exclusions, additional visits for low birth weight infants, multiple possible delivery locations, and severely limited infrastructure posed significant challenges to the MRC’s team.

Mobile Researcher Implementation

Mobile Researcher, used in phase two of the project, was again leveraged as the data collection and communication platform and formed the base on which the development of a portal to cater for the project’s custom logistical, operational and reporting requirements was built.  CHWs could use their entry level handsets (used previously for the collection of baseline data), to complete surveys about each participant visit.  This feedback, along with information regarding enrolment and birth events from data collectors –also captured via low cost mobile phones– was exposed by the Mobile Researcher Application Programming Interface (API) for incorporation into the purpose-built web portal – the Good Start Management Console (GSMC).

The GSMC leverages information from a variety of sources, including data captured on mobile phones to schedule, track, monitor and coordinate the operational activities necessary to fulfil the project mandate.  Supervisors, administrators and managers may login to see, at a glance, the current status of a participant, their upcoming milestones, notes, observations and previous interactions.  Only specific information based on a user’s role is available ensuring that blinding – a common requirement for most intervention studies – is not compromised.

Lasting Impact

The weekly meetings held with CHWs are informed by the wealth of information managed by the GSMC.  Visit schedules which are automatically generated by the system based on the most recent interactions may be printed for each CHW.  As visits take place and are captured in the field, the web-based portal updates to reflect a near real-time view of the progress on the ground.  Reported births from data collectors trigger scheduling of postnatal visits and notifications to supervisors.

Paper forms have been largely removed and data has become centralised and available to authorised project staff for their specific operational, analysis and reporting needs.  Subsequent enhancements will provide detailed performance reports, dashboards and additional functionality to further guide and assist in the successful implementation of this landmark study.