...and eventually got it, and was able to hire a programmer in the US and, not long after that, I left my job with the government to begin DataDyne in order to pursue projects like EpiSurveyor on a full-time basis.
Right now we have four full-time people, a couple of interns, three contract programmers in Bangalore, and one of our full-time programmers is in Nairobi. We have been getting some help from an organisation in the UK called Aptivate, based in Cambridge, and Cell-Life, which is located in Cape Town, South Africa.
What has the input been like from the wider open-source community?
Well, it is interesting — Cell-Life and Aptivate weren't part of our development team and I didn't know those organisations existed, and then they approached us. In the case of Aptivate, they looked us up and said: "We have been using EpiSurveyor for our HIV programmes in Zambia and we have some programming resources available in case you need some help moving the project along". That was quite exciting for us, as people outside the project were using our software.
And with Cell-Life, they develop open-source software and said: "We think that EpiSurveyor is just the thing for a mobile front end for a project that we are working on, so why don't we work together on some things?" They put in some programming time — particularly towards the development of a Java J2ME version of EpiSurveyor to run on a mobile phone.
So is EpiSurveyor restricted to use on Palm devices at the moment?
Episurveyor is written to run in SuperWaba, which is an open-source super-set of Java that can run on mobile devices. Because we have limited resources, we have spent all our time working on the Palm platform, but it's certainly a frequent request that EpiSurveyor should run on, for example, Windows Mobile.
Since SuperWaba does run on Windows Mobile, from talking to the programming team I understand it's not a big deal to move EpiSurveyor to Windows Mobile — we shouldn't have to re-write the programme at all, apart from the communications aspect: the way in which you transfer a designed form from your desktop to the device and vice versa.
How does EpiSurveyor work? Is there a desktop client and a mobile client?
Yes. On the desktop you have a Java environment running, and that is where you design and create the [health survey] forms. On the Palm platform, you use the Palm synchronisation tool to transfer forms to the device and data from the device.
When it comes to cell phones, that is a whole other interesting topic in terms of methods we will use to transmit forms to the mobile devices and data back from the cell phones. At this point, we are trying to think about how we can create better tools for people who are using EpiSurveyor to manage the survey process.
Imagine if you were in charge of a children's vaccination programme in Thailand, and you had to go out and find out what percentage of children are vaccinated against measles. The only way to do that is to go out and do a vaccination survey. You can imagine, as all the vaccination officers at this point have cell phones, how nice it would be if you could go to a website and see something that looks like the [PC client] local version of EpiSurveyor. You would then be able to create your survey form [online], but then you would have an additional layer within that which would be the user management; you could enter the users, and you could indicate what teams they were on.
You could then distribute that form via SMS or GPRS to the mobile devices of the other people who ought to be out there and participating in the survey. It would just appear, they could accept it and then transmit the data they have collected in exactly the same way. That would be a huge step up from the current process.
That was going to be my next question — how low-end can you go with the actual mobile client? Are you talking about smartphones or any kind of mobile phone?
We are definitely not just talking about smartphones. Even though we are only targeting Palm devices at the moment, it's always been the case that we just don't want to provide software to international organisations with large budgets that can buy $500 (£250) devices. In fact, with the huge rollout we are doing with the WHO in their African regional office, with the assistance of the Vodafone Foundation and The UN Foundation, even that rollout was done based on using the $75 Palm which is the lowest-end unconnected Palm you can get.
There are lot of complications when you start programming for the low-end cell-phone platform, because it is really a stack of different platforms and there is a huge lack of standardisation. I think, over the next five years, we are going to see a tremendous thinning-out of these non-standard platforms, driven by the iPhone platform and a number of others. For the time being...
