The use of mobile phones as a data collection tool: A report from a household survey in South Africa

BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making - Tập 9 - Trang 1-8 - 2009
Mark Tomlinson1, Wesley Solomon2, Yages Singh3, Tanya Doherty4,5, Mickey Chopra6, Petrida Ijumba3, Alexander C Tsai7, Debra Jackson5
1Department of Psychology, Stellenbosch University, Parrow, South Africa
2Health Systems Research Unit, Medical Research Council, Parrow, South Africa
3Health Systems Research Unit, Medical Research Council, Durban, South Africa
4Health Systems Research Unit, Medical Research Council, Francie van Zyl Drive, Parrow, South Africa
5School of Public Health, University of the Western Cape, Bellville, South Africa
6Chief, Health, UNICEF, United Nations Plaza, New York, USA
7Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute, University of California at San Francisco, USA

Tóm tắt

To investigate the feasibility, the ease of implementation, and the extent to which community health workers with little experience of data collection could be trained and successfully supervised to collect data using mobile phones in a large baseline survey A web-based system was developed to allow electronic surveys or questionnaires to be designed on a word processor, sent to, and conducted on standard entry level mobile phones. The web-based interface permitted comprehensive daily real-time supervision of CHW performance, with no data loss. The system permitted the early detection of data fabrication in combination with real-time quality control and data collector supervision. The benefits of mobile technology, combined with the improvement that mobile phones offer over PDA's in terms of data loss and uploading difficulties, make mobile phones a feasible method of data collection that needs to be further explored.

Tài liệu tham khảo

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BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making

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