Tag: mobile

Mobile-ready Maternal and Child Care modules now available

We are very pleased to announce that we have released updated mobile-ready versions of the HEAT maternal and child care modules for our OppiaMobile platform. This work has been made possible through funding from mPowering Frontline Health Workers and UKAID (DFID).

Although previously we had made available summary versions of all the HEAT modules, we now have the whole module content adapted for mobile delivery.

Which modules have been adapted?

So far, we have adapted the following HEAT modules:

  • Antenatal Care (Parts 1 & 2)
  • Labor and Delivery Care
  • Postnatal Care
  • Integrated Management of Newborn and Childhood Illness (Parts 1 & 2)
  • Immunization
  • Nutrition

Soon we will release adapted versions for the remaining 7 modules covering other public health issues such as communicable and non-communicable diseases, family planning and adolescent/youth reproductive health.

How have the modules been adapted?

The HEAT modules were originally written for the upgrade training for the Health Extension Programme in Ethiopia and is the approved upgrade training by the Ethiopia Federal Ministry of Health.

For the mobile-ready adaptation process, we have removed specific references to Ethiopia and Health Extension Workers, along with cross references between different sections of the content. We anticipate that this will make it much easier for other organisations providing frontline health worker training to reuse/repurpose the content for their needs. However, the original full versions with all the Ethiopian references are also available.

We have also added extra quiz questions and video content – most of the video content has been provided by Medical Aid Films and Global Health Media Project.

We view the content adaptation as an iterative process, so we will constantly be working to improve the content with additional media and quiz content. We also welcome any feedback and suggestions on how to improve the adaptations (see below).

How can I access them?

There are 3 different ways to access the content – depending on your needs:

  • You can download the modules to run offline on your Android smartphone directly from the OppiaMobile learning app.
  • You can browse the content directly on our Moodle server. Although this applies the same stylesheet as when the content is viewed in the OppiaMobile app, the navigation and layout isn’t identical to the mobile app. This option is likely to be useful if you’d like to get a feel for the subject areas covered by the modules and the activities included.
  • You can download the Moodle backup versions of these courses. This option is designed for you to be able to install the courses on your Moodle server for the purposes of providing localised versions, perhaps to fit your curriculum, or with references to the country/region in which you are delivering training.

Can I reuse/adapt these courses?

Yes certainly, all the courses are released under a Creative Commons license, and we have specifically chosen media content which is also released under an open license. So you are free to adapt these courses to fit your needs.

Have any questions or would like to provide feedback?

We welcome any questions, feedback or suggestions on these courses or if you would like to discuss with us how you can integrate mobile learning into your health worker training programme. Please contact us at: info@digital-campus.org

We’re hiring: Digital Content Developer for Primary Healthcare

Through our recent funding from DFID, we are looking to recruit a Digital Content Developer for Primary Healthcare to work with us on this project. A brief overview of the role:

  • You will be working with our medical and technical team to create and source high quality primary healthcare training content, activities and assessment for rural health workers in their continuous professional development activities.
  • You will ensure that all the training material is prepared to the highest standards of presentation, accuracy and educational value.
  • The ideal candidate will have excellent organisational skills and an ability to keep to tight deadlines. Proven experience of instructional design and teaching is essential.

and the key details:

  • Contract: 2 year fixed term contract
  • Hours: Part-time (20 hours p.w./0.5 FTE)
  • Location: Remote (home-based)
  • Salary: £26,600 to £28,700 p.a. (pro-rata)
  • Closing date: 13 September 2013

You can download the full job advert here: http://digital-campus.org/docs/ad-005.pdf and the job description here: http://digital-campus.org/docs/jd-005.pdf

To apply please send a copy of your CV with a supporting statement and details of 2 references to alex@digital-campus.org. References will not be taken up until after a job offer has been made.

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Elearning team office

Health worker mobile top-up usage analysis

Earlier this week one of my research colleagues sent me a spreadsheet with the breakdown for the last 6 months (Sept 2012 to Feb 2013) of how the health workers in our project have been making use of voice, SMS and data on their smartphones. The breakdown looks like this:

chart

The data shows that each health worker (per month) makes approximately 160 mins of voice calls, downloads 27Mb of data and sends 3 SMSs.

Few notes and comments:

  • the data was directly from the mobile company – not from any analysis tools/apps installed on the phones, so is about as accurate as we’d ever be able to get
  • in the data above I’ve only included the health extension workers and midwives, the supervisors usage is not included (although we have figures for them too)
  • we are giving 100 birr top-up per month to each health worker and we don’t restrict what this can be used for
  • for the data it’s clear that the the health workers are adding their own top-up balance too (in addition to the 100 birr we give)

What interesting for us is that the health workers are clearly using the data connection for much more than simply submitting the protocol forms and the accessing the mobile scorecard, although at an average of 27Mb per month, this is a long way from the 500Mb+ per month many people in EU/US often get through.

The very low level of text messaging (less than 3 SMSs sent per month) is also very interesting to see. One possible reason for this (and this also came from our baseline survey interviews) was that the health workers don’t use text messaging because they are not confident in using the Latin alphabet, or perhaps they know the recipient of the message cannot read the Latin alphabet, or doesn’t have a Ge’ez capable phone.

There’s a lot more analysis and info we how we can get from this data – especially when we look at matching up usage of the patient management tools and whether increased usage of these tools also corresponds to increased data usage – but we’ll save much of this for our upcoming technical paper.

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Patient management tools – one year on

Our group of HEWs and midwives have now been using the ODK-based patient management tools for just over a year – that is using the tools with actual patients, they were using the tools for several months before this just for testing and for refining the patient visit forms.

Despite only working with a small group of HEWs and midwives (although recently approx 20 more joined the project), we now have over 1000 patients (pregnant mothers) registered who have attended ante-natal care or post-natal care visits. We also have nearly 300 deliveries recorded, although given we have 1000 pregnant mothers, we would expect this to increase substantially in the coming months.

Looking back over the patient visits forms submitted each day, we can see that the HEWs and midwives are making use of the tools more regularly, although we still see spikes in the number of forms submitted on some days – likely to coincide with ‘immunization days’ when more people attend the health centres/posts.

Now that we’re building up a lot of experience, data and knowledge in how the tools are being used, As I’ve already posted up (here and here) Araya has already had a couple of research papers published in this area, and we’re now working on completing the feasibility study and technical papers.

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New mobile HEAT application

I’ve recently been rewriting the mobile HEAT application and I now have a first version ready for people to test out. You can get the app from Google Play for installing on you Android phone. As it’s just a first version, I’d really appreciate any feedback (either email me directly or post a comment below), which is also why I’ve just posted it up here, rather than making it available on the Google Play store – which I’ll do once it’s been tested a little more.

Few notes comments on how to use the app and what it does:

  • As with the previous version, you’ll need a MQuiz login account (though you can register for this directly in the app). So you do need an active internet connection on your phone for this step.
  • Unlike the previous version, this app comes with no course content. This was one of the main reasons for rewriting this app: to decouple the content from the app. So after you’ve first logged in, click on the ‘manage modules’ button and you can get a list of the available modules you can install, so you can select which content you’d like to download. You’ll also need an active internet connection for doing this, though I have built in a way in which you can just put the course package directly on the phone SD card and it will auto install.
  • Once you’re logged in and have downloaded some content, an active internet connection is no longer needed.
  • For testing out the video content (in the “video demo” course), the videos are not included in the course download package (as it makes the download packages too large). If you’d like to test the video content, please download the .m4v files and place them all in the /mtrain/media/ directory on the phone sd card.

There are 3 main areas I’d really appreciate feedback on:

  1. Tracking: as you navigate through the content (play videos and take assessment exercises) the app records your activity to submit back to the server (for example, so your course tutor/supervisor can see how you’re doing). The app tries to do this whenever you complete an activity (so connects to the internet at this point), but it may be that you’re offline at the time. Note that a text page is only considered as being completed if you have spent at least 3 seconds on the page before moving to the next one (to at least give some pretence that you may actually have read the content ;-)). To cover the possibility that you may be offline when using the app, but you still want your activity logged, the app also installs a service to try to connect once an hour to submit your activity, even if you’re not using the app. I’m a little unsure that this is the best approach, since I’m not too keen on applications connecting to the internet in the background, but I haven’t yet thought of a better way to handle this. I may just add a preference to allow you to decide if this service is allowed to connect or not. But any comments/thoughts on this appreciated.
  2. Navigation: once inside a course module, I’d like some feedback on the navigation between the activities for each section in the course. Currently you can’t see a full list of all the activities for a given section, without clicking on the previous/next arrow buttons, as I wanted to avoid the user needing to go through another list selection page to get to the activity, but I’m not sure that what I’ve done so far is quite right.
  3. App name: I’m not too keen on the app name ‘mTrain’, so any suggestions for alternative names welcome!

In the next days, for those of you who don’t have an Android phone to test this on, I’ll post up a video of the app in action.

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