Paper Session: Kits and Systems
Robit: An Extensible Auction-based Market Platform for Challenged Environments
Azarias Reda, Quang Duong, Timur Alperovich, Brian Noble, Yidnekachew Haile
There is a need for an efficient mechanism for trading services, goods, and that is somewhat independent on your personal relationship with an Internet kiosk or the mere accessibility to a kiosk.
Robit leverages on Sulula kiosks to provide the end user with valuable data that can be accessed via SMS. Simple SMS based operations are also possible to enable interactivity with the auction application. Voice is included too as a feature.
Robit does not provide a payment system and transactions happen offline.
Open Data Kit: Tools to Build Information Services for Developing Regions
Carl Hartung, Yaw Anokwa, Waylon Brunette, Adam Lerer, Clint Tseng, Gaetano Borriello
Open Data Kit (ODK) is an open-source suite of tools that helps organizations author, field, and manage mobile data collection solutions
. A good example on an intensive data collection procedure is a patient’s health record, but there are many others in transportation, weather reporting, etc.
Paper-based practice in low-income countries limits the scale, complexity and impact of interventions. Indeed, there is a lag between data being collected and actionable information. On the other hand, important features are lost when using basic technology.
ODK allows for an easy creation of forms by just dragging and dropping objects on the screen. At the Build stage, forms are stored as XForms, that describe the form logic and data schema.
The form can be used on an Adroid smartphone (can run too on JavaRosa) at the Collect stage to gather the desired data, including rich data like sound and video.
At Aggregate the codebase runs locally and in the cloud, can use information stored in XForms as a database, can store of forward data to external systems (e.g. Google Maps or OpenMRS).
Discussion.
Q: What about security and sensitive data? A: This is definitely a topic that is being addressed and that still needs some work to be done.
