For us, it’s a strong indication that the use of mobile and web technologies is becoming more widely accepted in the public health community as a viable and valuable tool in tackling primary health care issues.

The presentations at the conference where Mobile Researcher was involved include:

• Experiences of using cell phones in data collection in a large scale project (V. Magasana, P. Ijumba, Z. Msimela, S. Ndwandwe, N. Radebe, M. Msweli, S. Mavuso)
• Using a web based information system to manage the implementation of a randomised controlled trial (P. Ijumba, Y. Singh, M. Tomlinson)

Several other organisations present findings on studies where Mobile Researcher was also leveraged as a data collection tool.

As we work with a number of organisations with a strong focus on public health, we’ll be there to highlight how mobile and web technologies are being used to solve real public health challenges, particularly for initiatives involving community-based health workers and randomised control trials. Using mobile phones as the catalyst, practical health information systems can be established which can be used for logistics management, fieldworker monitoring, participant and patient tracking, monitoring and evaluation, and pure data collection.

We’ll also be demonstrating the latest feature enhancements to our mobile application which are due to go live in a few weeks. A few of the organisations who are using Mobile Researcher in their projects will also be presenting papers at the conference.

We hope to see you at the conference – please feel free to drop by our exhibition stand to engage, challenge and brainstorm with us. We’ll have a few handsets there for anyone interested to try out the mobile application for themselves.