EpiCollect: Linking Smartphones to Web Applications for Epidemiology, Ecology and Community Data Collection

Abstract

BackgroundEpidemiologists and ecologists often collect data in the field and, on returning to their laboratory, enter their data into a database for further analysis. The recent introduction of mobile phones that utilise the open source Android operating system, and which include (among other features) both GPS and Google Maps, provide new opportunities for developing mobile phone applications, which in conjunction with web applications, allow two-way communication between field workers and their project databases.MethodologyHere we describe a generic framework, consisting of mobile phone software, EpiCollect, and a web application located within www.spatialepidemiology.net. Data collected by multiple field workers can be submitted by phone, together with GPS data, to a common web database and can be displayed and analysed, along with previously collected data, using Google Maps (or Google Earth). Similarly, data from the web database can be requested and displayed on the mobile phone, again using Google Maps. Data filtering options allow the display of data submitted by the individual field workers or, for example, those data within certain values of a measured variable or a time period.ConclusionsData collection frameworks utilising mobile phones with data submission to and from central databases are widely applicable and can give a field worker similar display and analysis tools on their mobile phone that they would have if viewing the data in their laboratory via the web. We demonstrate their utility for epidemiological data collection and display, and briefly discuss their application in ecological and community data collection. Furthermore, such frameworks offer great potential for recruiting ‘citizen scientists’ to contribute data easily to central databases through their mobile phone.

Drivers and risk factors for circulating African swine fever virus in Uganda, 2012–2013

“…Communication gaps between farmers and designated veterinary authorities should be minimized (Aanensen et al, 2009;FAO, 2013).…”

A Citizen Science Approach for Collecting Toponyms

“…For instance, Humanitarian OSM Team (HOT) Indonesia developed Geo Data Collect (https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Geo_Data_Collect) by integrating OSMTracker for Android (https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OSMTracker_(Android)) and OpenDataKit (ODK) Collect (https://opendatakit.org/use/collect/). EpiCollect (http://www.epicollect.net/) is used by epidemiologists and ecologists, together with citizen scientists, for epidemiological data collection, collation, and visualization [45]. Meanwhile, the Towns Conquer game [21] was developed using Android SDK and ArcGIS SDK on the mobile client side, web services using PHP and SQL Server database on the server side.…”

Web 2.0 Broker: A standards-based service for spatio-temporal search of crowd-sourced information

“…This poses the question whether VGI may be seen as an alternative source of information to complement authoritative data from GIIs (Craglia et al, 2008), so as to improve traditional geospatial analysis and decision support tasks (Flanagin and Metzger, 2008;Pultar et al, 2009) since it provides data at high spatio temporal scales (Zook et al, 2010). Experts and decision makers may even benefit from VGI data in multiple analysis situations such as epidemiology (Aanensen et al, 2009) and geo-demographics (Singleton and Longley, 2009). In these cases the bottom-up approach exemplified by crowd-sourcing services may complement the top-down methodologies that articulate GIIs.…”