We’ve written in the past here on the ONE Blog about the power of mobile phones in the developing world. Science Daily has an interesting article about using cell phones as data-collection devices.

Excerpts below, full piece here.

UW computer scientists were already working on mobile tools for the developing world when Android, the first comprehensive open-source platform for mobile devices, was announced two years ago by the Open Handset Alliance, a group of companies of which Google is a member. For the past year UW computer science and engineering doctoral students Carl Hartung, Yaw Anokwa and Waylon Brunette have worked at Google’s Seattle office using Android to create a data-collection platform for use in developing regions.

Their free suite of tools, named Open Data Kit, is already used by organizations around the world that need inexpensive ways to gather information in areas with little infrastructure. Seattle’s Grameen Foundation Technology Center is using it to evaluate its Ugandan text-messaging information hotline; D-Tree International, a Boston-based nonprofit, is using it in Tanzania to guide health workers treating children under 5 years old; the University of California, Berkeley’s Human Rights Center is using it to record human rights violations in the Central African Republic. This fall the Jane Goodall Foundation in Tanzania and the Brazilian Forest Service signed up to use it to monitor deforestation.

Many organizations are using Open Data Kit, but the biggest project so far is a major effort to track and treat HIV patients in Kenya. Led by the Academic Model Providing Access to Healthcare, a U.S. Agency for International Development-funded partnership between Indiana University and Kenya’s Moi University, it is one of the most comprehensive HIV treatment programs in sub-Saharan Africa. AMPATH trains Kenyan community health workers who conduct door-to-door testing in rural areas for HIV, tuberculosis and malaria, and offer ongoing personalized health counseling.