Survey App for Public Health Monitoring Drive
The Non-Communicable Diseases(NCD) Survey Android application was done for AMCHSS [Achutha Menon Centre for Health Science Studies], a center of excellence for public health training by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Government of India. The main objective of AMCHSS is to train health professionals in health research and in the formulation and implementation of health policies. One of the major research projects of AMC was on building capacity for tobacco cessation in India and Indonesia supported by the Fogarty International Center of the US National Institutes of Health. Another important project was the community interventions for health project supported by the Oxford Health Alliance UK. The interventions were implemented in schools, worksites, health centers, and neighborhood groups. For achieving this, surveys were conducted in neighborhoods to check the extent of people affected with Non-Communicable Diseases(NCD) such as Diabetes, Hypertension, Cholesterol, etc.
The application is to be used for finding the participant (household member) from a particular house during the survey of Non-Communicable Disease Monitoring and Verbal Autopsy. An ODK collect application is to be used for collecting information from people by filling the forms/tables during the survey and it could be saved as .xml files inside the ODK collect. The collected information is to be sent to the NCD Survey application to process and find out the participant using the KISH algorithm and return the result to the ODK collect.
Areas of Bottleneck
The main difficulty faced in the development of the NCD Survey application was in the data passing area where the collected data must be passed from one application to another installed on the same device. Here the data collection is done through a converted .xml file from the .xlsx sheet which is saved inside the ODK collect. The collected data must be passed to the NCD Survey application for processing.
Approach
After the requirement analysis the mobility team of Zyxware Technologies developed the NCD Survey application. This was done after a complete study was done on the possibilities of passing bulk data from a .xml file stored inside the ODK collect application to our application by using the 'Intent' data passing mechanism.
Technologies Used
NCD Survey application is used for collecting the data from ODK collect to process and find out the participant using KISH algorithm and return the result to the ODK collect. The following link will give the idea of passing data from ODK collect to the external application.
https://opendatakit.org/help/form-design/external-apps/
<input appearance="ex:org.myapp.COLLECT(started=/externaltest/starttime, constant='----', randomNumber=random())" ref="/externaltest/textField">
'Intent' data passing mechanism is used here by editing the .xml and adding some external code before it is stored in the ODK collect. Also here the result returned is shown in a table format inside the page in the ODK collect application from where we have to go to the NCD Survey app.
Third Party Integrations Used
The third party application used here is the ODK Collect 1.4.3
Result
The NCD Survey application was useful in finding the participant (household member) from a particular house during the survey of Non-communicable Disease Monitoring and Verbal Autopsy. Before closing the NCD Survey, it was also used to remind the data collector to take up the verbal autopsy, to find if there was a death in the household.
This tool helped in simplifying the process to find the eligible candidate from each household that matched the criteria for the survey. Man-hours of at least 2 hours per household were saved by automating this process.
