The mobile health squad
Collecting health information is vital but time consuming: open-source software has a cure.
“When you hear a statistic about the number of children in Cambodia who are HIV positive, that represents months of people going around the country and filling out forms,” says Dr Joel Selanikio. “They then send months of years typing that information up. As a result the final statistics are out of date.”
To remedy this, DataDyne – a non-profit Washington-DC based company founded by Selanikio and Rose Donna, a computer scientist who previously worked for the Red Cross – developed EpiSurveyor, the first mobile-phone and web app designed to collect public health data. It’s open-source and free to download, and allows users to design a survey which can be customised to any type of data. EpiSurveyor is now operating in more than 20 African countries. It has also been downloaded by the UK government, the Canadian Ministry… [more]
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