1. Developing an Application for Social Workers in Tanzania Daniel Nuffer Anthony Velázque

2. Community, Needs and Solutions The targeted community is social workers in Tanzania They need a more efficient manner of entering and accessing data from the field We are investigating creating a cell phone application to meet these needs

3. Social Work in Tanzania Demand for social work has been increasing due to AIDS. AIDS has created an epidemic, 2.5 million children have lost at least one parent to AIDS. Fewer than 6% are currently receiving outside assistance. Sources: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7239047.stm http://www.twinningagainstaids.org/documents/OVCProgramOverviewSummer2008_001.pdf

4. Social Work in Tanzania The problem is exacerbated by crippling poverty rate. 36% of Tanzania’s population lives below the poverty line.

5. Social Worker Resources being Stretched Only 1/3 of the 126 Tanzania districts have a trained social worker. Nearly 8,000 workers will be needed to meet increasing demand.

6. What’s Being Done Training more social workers – In 2007 the Para-Social Workers Training Program was launched to train community-based caregivers social work training for orphans and vulnerable children. – Training can be completed in 8 days with 6 months of follow up supervision. – Has created 516 Para-Social Workers, 40 district social workers, and 55 master trainers in the 2007- 2008 year.

7. Problems Still Prevalent A report from a similar program in Kenya showed problems with monitoring. – Volunteers want a user-friendly monitoring tool to enroll orphans and vulnerable children and provide assessment of their needs. – Current form based monitoring is inconsistent and large numbers of forms quickly becomes cumbersome to keep track.

8. Current Forms of Monitoring HIV/AIDS Monitoring is done through TOMSHA – Paper forms completed by workers. – Submitted to a Council HIV AIDS Committee (CHAC). – CHAC digitizes forms and sends them onto Local Government Monitoring Database.

9. Database Connectivity The HIV/AIDS monitoring uses Microsoft Database Access Objects. However, this is just for HIV/AIDS monitoring, information on the database tracking social workers may be different. Further research is necessary on how monitoring of social workers is conducted.

10. Infrastructure Cell phone prevalence – 5.7 million current cell phone subscribers in Tanzania – 97% of Tanzanians have access to a mobile phone. – Kurumuna discussed not only the widespread presence of cell phones but users’ aptitudes for text messaging.

11. TTCL Tanzania Telecommunications Company LTD. (TTCL) – Offers a 3G digital wireless network. – Purchase Rafiki Top-Up Cards.

12. Celtel Tanzania Created after privatization of TTCL Largest Company Based on Coverage Area: Source: GSMworld.com

13. Coverage Issues Clear that coverage may still be a problem. Large sections of Tanzania still rural. 2007 University of Washington study on data collection in Tanzanian disconnected environments with mobile phones. – Proposed a hop based routing system to connect to an Internet server – May be implausible with 10 week program.

14. Solutions – We need a solution that runs on as many cell phones as possible – Usability is a large concern – We would like to employ pre-existing APIs or other work in our solution

15. Existing Projects HealthLine CAMBrowser OpenROSA Epihandy

16. HealthLine Being developed by Carnegie Mellon University. Speech-based health information access tool. User calls a server which responds to voice- commands to access health information and medical texts.

17. HealthLine Pros: – Speech technologies address low literacy issues. – Speech technologies do not require installations on all phones.

18. HealthLine Cons: – Technology currently only designed and tested for information access. Data entry is theoretically possible, but untested. – Requires a central server and landline infrastructure to handle call requests, which may be difficult to set up.

19. CAMBrowser Mobile phone application for collecting information from remote areas. Utilizes mobile phone cameras to capture barcodes from paper forms. Mobile phone camera barcodes and numerical indexes tracks the progression through the forms. Completed forms are sent using SMS.

20. CAMBrowser Pros: – Camera based and numerical indexing simplifies menu navigation for low-literacy users. – Form changes occur through SMS and MMS communications. Upon an SMS request for updates an MMS message is returned containing XML code for new forms. – Usability test in India: After three days receipts could be processed in 30 seconds with a less than 1% error rate. Ongoing studies continue.

21. CAMBrowser Cons: – CAMBrowser is designed for smart phones. While cell phones may be prevalent in Tanzania, we will almost certainly need a solution that works on a wider range of technology. – CAMBrowser requires phone local memory, the size and prevalence of phone memory cards is questionable.

22. OpenROSA/JavaROSA A consortium attempted to establish a standard for developing mobile phone data collecting applications. A J2ME framework created corresponding to OpenROSA’s standards for Java-enabled mobile phones.

23. OpenRosa/JavaRosa Pros: – Java-enabled phones are prevalent in 2009. Club- Java* lists hundreds of phones currently supporting J2ME. – Working with an established consortium is a positive for future support as well as extensive documentation available when creating a new applications. *http://www.club-java.com/TastePhone/J2ME/MIDP_Benchmark.jsp;jsessionid=33D16056AE430FB72D5A99C68E7EEB92

24. OpenRosa/JavaRosa Cons: – While Java-enabled phones are highly prevalent, they are not ubiquitous. Statistics about the actual phones social workers use are difficult to find and will require ground work. – Installation of applications will be required on mobile phones.

25. EpiHandy Collection of tools for mobile applications designed for collection and handling of data using mobile devices. Capable of sending and retrieving data over SMS, Bluetooth, and HTTP. A founding member of the OpenROSA/JavaROSA community.

26. EpiHandy Pros: – EpiHandy is already written and deployed. Utilizing EpiHandy speeds up the development process allowing us to get to fine tuning and deployment effectiveness rather than spending substantial time in development. – EpiHandy Mobile extension designed for low-end phones while retaining EpiHandy functionality

27. EpiHandy Cons: – Will have to be installed on phones. EpiHandy mobile requires some method of transfer between a computer and the mobile device. Additionally Nokia models may require the Nokia PC Suite.

28. Web-Application Any of a number of possible web design mechanisms to develop a form submittal application over the Internet. Can be accessed by kiosks or any available Internet connection.

29. Web-Application Pros: – Substantially larger toolset. Designing for the web has a robust set of ways to solve the problem. – Ease of developing user interfaces makes developing a software that is user friendly to use much easier. – We may design a web-app to deal with more complicated administrative tasks than can be done through a cell-phone app.

30. Web-Application Cons: – Accessibility to computers much less Internet isn’t possible in many areas. – Computer literacy may also hamper workers abilities to submit data.

31. Remaining Questions Since much of this is sensitive information, we will need to be very conscious of security issues. Developing training for the mobile phone applications. – Users may not be used to cell phone applications. – Installation may be difficult. – We will need to establish a permanent server somewhere.

32. Questions?