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Combating rural child malnutrition through inexpensive mobile phones

Published: 14 October 2012 Publication History

Abstract

Most organizations in the developing world still rely on paper for record keeping, giving rise to many problems in aggregation, storage, transmission and analysis of data. Errors and time delays associated with paper data are particularly problematic in the domain of healthcare. We present a case study of CommCare, a low-cost mobile phone data collection solution deployed to enhance the paper-based record management system of a non-profit organization working in prevention of child malnutrition in rural central India. Through a three-month unsupervised field trial with ten rural health workers we report data management gains in terms of data quality, completeness and timeliness for 836 recorded patient cases, and demonstrate strong preference of the system by health workers. We found that the motivation for use and acceptance of the system was tied to respect and social power in local communities associated with using the device, as well as non-work-related uses of the phone.

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    cover image ACM Other conferences
    NordiCHI '12: Proceedings of the 7th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction: Making Sense Through Design
    October 2012
    834 pages
    ISBN:9781450314824
    DOI:10.1145/2399016
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 14 October 2012

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    Author Tags

    1. data collection
    2. developing region
    3. health workers
    4. low-end mobile phones
    5. malnutrition

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    NordiCHI '12 Paper Acceptance Rate 84 of 341 submissions, 25%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 379 of 1,572 submissions, 24%

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    • (2023)Towards Intermediated Workflows for Hybrid TelemedicineProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3580653(1-17)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
    • (2022)Imagining Caring Futures for Frontline Health WorkProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35555816:CSCW2(1-30)Online publication date: 11-Nov-2022
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