Smap API

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I have been working on a project to allow reports from Smap to be added to a portal that provides an assessment of the situation in the first 72 hours after a rapid onset emergency. This is for World Vision’s Speed Evidence project, Ushahidi are writing the portal.

These new reports support oembed so they can be inserted into a wordpress blog such as this one. Here is a report containing a map.

https://dev.smap.com.au/surveyKPI/reports/view/55b17e69-e303-4993-94af-679ac21187e7

The above report is a map from the Smap analysis dashboard showing:

  1. A select multiple question on problems grouped by an arbitrary set of hexagonal polygons.  The colours represent the relative percentages of interviewees who reported safety concerns in the hexagonal area.  Red indicates a very high percentage blue a very low percentage. Green is somewhere in the middle. (It follows the Red – Orange – Yellow – Green – Blue scale).
  2. A select one question on type of refugee camps in the area

Here is another report containing a graph showing the problems reported grouped by the gender of the person reporting the problem.

https://dev.smap.com.au/surveyKPI/reports/view/b4a5a777-da5b-4227-ba36-bcb2dec14c5a

Finally here is a report containing a table.

https://dev.smap.com.au/surveyKPI/reports/view/d6b4f980-ca9e-4ac3-8728-01dcd1587962

This table shows the average age of the people who reported each problem.

This capability is still beta and will be released in 2-3 weeks.  Some of the work that still needs to happen includes:

  1. Setting the size of the report so it doesn’t leave whitespace when embedded in wordpress or another container
  2. Better legends and descriptions of the content of the report generated directly by the Smap server.

Announcement of Smap Release – May 2013

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This release contains mainly bug fixes and minor improvements.  There was one major bug related to the pooling of database connections. Fortunately this didn’t cause any problems on the hosted servers as I had not enabled pooling.  But if you installed the server yourself, where it is enabled by default,then you may have noticed some issues.  I strongly recommend that you upgrade to this latest release.  http://smap-suite.googlecode.com/files/smap_13_05_01.tgz

Other changes include:

  1. You can assign a task where the location is described as a polygon rather than just a point.

    Task Management

    A task with polygon location on the phone

  2. “Relevance” was not working on repeating groups. Now it does.
  3. I removed the Twitter panel from the dashboard.
  4. Audio files are played in the media player.  At least it works for AMR files.
  5. Address items can be added to a new task. These items are selectable from an existing survey.  Hence if you are doing follow up surveys you can include data from the original survey to guide the user to the right location.
  6. The addresses of tasks can be printed, and address items can be set to be barcodes.  Hence the enumerator can get the barcode from the address in order to link the new survey to the old survey.

Announcement of Smap Release – April 2013

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Dashboard panels are now only viewable by the user that created them.  No more sharing!  The concept of sharing all dashboard panels worked reasonably well when a project team was working collaboratively on a project.  But there were still issues, for example when a team member wanted to do some experimentation with graphs.  However there were significant problems during workshops when 30 odd people were creating and deleting panels independently and the system was trying to keep all of the panels in sync.   So I came to the conclusion that no-sharing is better than sharing everything.   If anyone has any ideas on how to introduce some managed sharing back in to the dashboard panels let me know.

You can now specify address fields from the previous survey in follow up tasks.  See picture below:

tasks

fieldTask works a little differently.  The menu option “get new forms” now goes direct to the server.  If you want to delete forms or data from the phone you will need to select “delete forms” from the main menu.  

Other changes:

  • More informative error messages when uploading templates
  • Surveys can be set in settings to automatically upload when they have been completed (with odk1.3)
  • In settings you can specify the use of forward and next buttons instead of swiping (with odk1.3)
  • Vertices of polygon questions are now shown on map panels.  Apart from allowing the user to look at question responses on each point of the polygon the display of these points make it easier to find small polygons on the map.  (This one for Mark)
  • The usual assortment of bug fixes

If you want to go fast go alone, if you want to go far go together

An old african proverb.  It is also written large on the walls of Johannesburg airport.  I think its a great proverb.  

A few of our “team work” obsessed corporations could learn from this.  True you need team work and an organisation to make far reaching changes but if you don’t want to get bogged down then sometimes you need to hand the work over to one person, or maybe a few people, to make some rapid progress and deliver an updated draft for the team to work on.

Announcement of Smap Release – March 2013 (mini release)

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This is a rare mid-month release to add some functionality that I want to demonstrate at the WV Regional Disaster Management Training conference in Delhi.  The principal changes are improvements to task management. 

tasks

New Features:

  1. Reports are now specific to projects rather than to organisations.
  2. Publishing of reports to email, facebook and twitter can now be turned on or off at the organisation level
  3. Reports can be posted to twitter
  4. New tasks can be created by clicking on a map
  5. Tasks are now at the project level so each project can have its own set of tasks
  6. Tasks can be deleted by selecting them on the map
  7. Cancelled tasks can be cleared so they no longer on the task administration screen
  8. Plus multiple bug fixes

Announcement of Smap Release – February 2013

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The february release of Smap is out of development and undergoing pre-release testing.

New Features:

  1. Multi-projects.  A user with administrator privilege can now create a new project and assign users to that project.  This allows you to manage separation of projects on the same server.  A user will only see the survey templates and results for the projects that they are assigned.
  2. Pictures, videos and audio can be included as survey questions or options.  Any or all of these media types can be added, along with text, to help an enumerator in completing a survey.  This capability has been on the phone for a while as it is part of odkCollect.  However the ability to manage this media on the server is new.  (video)
  3. Publish reports to a Facebook group.  This extends the current ability to publish a report via email.  A menu option named “Discuss” has also been added to allow you to link to a new Facebook app from Smap Consulting, that summarises the discussions on the reports as a word cloud and shows the locations of reports on a map.  (video)
  4. Added ability to specify an export of data as XLS or CSV.  For XLS exports the following formatting is now applied:

  • Dates.  Formatted correctly for excel and always set to GMT.  To change the timezone in excel add the hours difference divided by 24.  You can now do calculations such as subtracting _start from _end to get the duration of the survey.
  • _device formatted as number so it does not show as scientific notation by default.
  • Links added to locations.  If you click on the link it will show on a map where the survey was completed.
  • Links added to pictures, video and audio.

Bugs Fixed

  1. Hourglasses were not always being shown when the system was busy
  2. Name of survey in monitor screen was not being shown.
  3. Could not filter by survey name in monitor screen.Burn Down Chart
  4. Running out of database connections under heavy load

This diagram is of the project burn down and is taken from Acunote, which is a great tool for managing Agile projects. The chart shows the rate of progress across the month and confirms that development was completed on time.  Of course any tasks that could not be done prior to the release date, and that could be moved, were simply put into the sprint for the March release.  Completing “on time” for an agile project is usually a given!

Real Time Assessments

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Stuart Thomson has put up a great site Desire Lines for Change showing how the  Smap software can be used to contribute to community discussions and decision making.  This fits well with one of the principles on which the software has been developed.

The idea came from when I worked at Rolls Royce aero engines R&D labs back in the early 80’s. Royces had this concept of assessing in real time whether or not an engine test was successful,  real time was defined as 20 minutes.  Within this time it had to be possible to decide if the test was successful and whether or not we could move on to the next test.  The totality of the data from the test, which could be very large,  would however be analysed over weeks, months and even years in order to contribute to engine design decisions.  If this data was going to be useful then we had to know if we had done enough cycles and the engine was run within the required parameters.  The diagram below shows the principle.

real time

The Smap mobile phones software is intended to contribute to this sort of real time assessment shown as the green 20 minute cycle in the picture above.  The data is collected and can then be analysed in the dashboard which may result in requests for more data.  Once the data is assessed as sound it can then be exported and analysed in a statistical analysis package or a GIS system over much longer periods of time.

Similarly as described in Desire Lines for Change, an initial assessment with the mobile phones can be made.  The data can be analysed and checked using the dashboard.  It can then be posted into a community forum to prompt an ongoing discussion, the results of which can be used in subsequent design decisions.

A report released today stated that 43% of Australians received sub-standard (below best practice) care at each visit to a general practitioner.  http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-07-16/healthcare-system-failing-australians/4132056. Apparently this is largely due to GPs not being up to date with the latest treatments and practices.  Smart phones were suggested as a way to improve the situation.

I recently spent a couple of weeks in Africa looking at ways to increase the effectiveness and reach of mHealth initiatives.  Its customary to emphasise the importance of low cost devices in developing countries.  Applications that only require SMS or voice can be used by the widest number of people on the lowest cost phones with the longest battery life. Which is absolutely true if you are creating an application to be used by the general population or community health workers then this is almost certainly the sort of phone technology that should be your first preference.  To some extent this is also still true in developed countries.  If SMS works for your app then you should probably use it.

However I think you can make a strong case that doctors in developing countries can benefit just as much from smart phones as GPs in developed countries, if not more so.  Just as mobile phones leap frogged land lines, supplying a developing country doctor with a smart phone or tablet connected to a cloud based server can be much simpler than equipping the clinic with PCs and associated medical software.  It is also cost effective if that phone becomes an integral part of treating scores of patients per day and reporting health informatics.

The following diagram attempts to illustrates this.

Phone cost versus ease of use, flexibility and capability

No future for j2me phones?  There does not seem to be much development happening on these phones in developed countries nowadays.  I don’t think that it should be so different in developing countries.  So maybe applications should either be aimed at low cost devices over SMS / Voice, or smart phones, or both.