Tag: odk

Demo site for patient management tools

We’ve just set up a demonstration site of our analytics and mobile site for the patient management tools. Previously if someone wanted to test out the tool for themselves, we could really only give them the mobile application and the protocols to look at, but we didn’t have a demo area for the server side. The only demo was on my laptop, and we can’t give access to the live site as it has real patient cases. I took this opportunity to look at using Amazon Web Services (EC2) for setting up the demo server – it all worked out really well and very easy to use.

You can log into the analytics/scorecard site at:

http://odk-demo.digital-campus.org/scorecard/ (username/password is demo/demo)

and the mobile version is at:

http://odk-demo.digital-campus.org/scorecard/mobile (same username/password)

The demo user has supervisor privileges, so is able to see all the data entered, usually health workers logging in would only get to see the data directly related to their patients.

If you would like to see the whole process, from entering the protocols on the smartphone, all the way through to seeing the cases on the analytics scorecard and mobile site, I also set up a demo ODK Aggregate server for submitting protocols. To set this up:

  1. Download and install on your phone our version of ODK
  2. start the app and enter the following settings (go to menu > change settings):
    • Server: http://odk-demo.digital-campus.org/ODKAggregate (note that this is case sensitive)
    • Username: demo
    • Password: demo
  3. Go to ‘get blank form’ – this should connect to the server and show all the available protocol forms – select and download the ones you would like to try out
  4. Enter and submit a few protocols from your phone
  5. You will then be able to see the forms you have entered on the analytics scorecard, and the mobile version – note that the forms don’t appear instantly on the scorecard or mobile site, it may take a couple of hours, as we have some caching running, to make the site run more quickly

Please let us know how you get on – especially if I need to add some more info to the instructions above.

Recent posting on OpenDataKit Blog

Recent posting on the OpenDataKit blog about our use of ODK to improve maternal care in Ethiopia:

Digital Campus is a not for profit company specializing in technology development in emerging countries. For several years, they have been working with Mekelle University (Ethiopia) and are supporting a PhD programme in public health in conjunction with Alcalá University (Spain) and Maastricht University (Netherlands). One of their projects is researching ways in which mobile technologies can help to improve maternal and child health care in rural areas of Ethiopia.

Read the full post at: http://opendatakit.org/2011/10/using-odk-to-improve-maternal-care-in-ethiopia/

OpenDataKit – entering dates in Ethiopian format

Some of the feedback we had from the initial HEW training last week was that some of the HEWs had difficulty in using the Gregorian calendar. Ethiopia has it’s own calendar which is the normal calendar used for the vast majority of Ethiopians (Ethiopian calendar entry on Wikipedia). Given that we’re asking the HEWs to collect date information, we need to make this as easy and understandable for them as possible – for example, to enter appointment dates a few weeks or months in advance. So over the past couple of days I’ve been looking at creating a date picker widget for integration into ODK Collect that will allow dates to be entered using the Ethiopian calendar format, but will store the date in the database as Gregorian. This transformation is hidden from the user and storing Gregorian dates in the database means we can manipulate and compare dates for reporting purposes, which we’d be unable to do storing Ethiopian dates as strings in the database (we can transform the dates back into Ethiopian calendar for final display).

It ended up being much more straightforward than I though it would be, especially with much help from the ODK Community and with the Joda Time java library already built into ODK Collect. I’ve got a first version ready for testing, so if anyone else is interested in having a look you can download the .apk file for installation on your Android phone.

To see the Ethiopian date picker working you’ll need to load up a form which specifies data picker. You can connect to our ODK Aggregate server at: http://hew-datacollect.appspot.com and download the EthioDateTestV1.5 form. Or you can download the original form XML to put on your own server.

This is only a first version, so any feedback is very welcome – or if you’d like the source code then please feel free to contact me (will put it up somewhere once I’ve tested it a bit more). [Update 19-Aug-11: I’ve now put all the code up as a clone on Google Code at https://code.google.com/r/alextlittle-dc-odk/, so you can see the full changes I’ve made.]

Finally, here are a couple of screenshots of the Ethiopian date picker running in my Android emulator:

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