Mobile Medic: Extending the Effective Reach of Mobile Data Infrastructure for Data Collection Applications in Emerging Regions

The recent explosion of mobile phone penetration in developing regions enables a variety of empowering new applications for mobile devices. A significant example of such an application is communication between hospitals in developing regions and their rural healthcare workforces.
The challenges of designing a data collection tool for healthcare workers in these environments are substantial: financial constraints prevent reliance on SMS as a go-to data transport mechanism, but infrastructural limitations prevent reliance on GPRS or other more sophisticated mobile web protocols. The complexity of these data transport requirements can necessitate limitations on data input, which must not interfere with the functionality needs of the target user group, which has little technical knowledge. This paper examines a number of methods that can be employed to design a better data collection tool targeted at community healthcare workers in developing regions, and presents a prototype tool that incorporates these advances.