SHB: Large: Collaborative Research: From the Ground Up -- Mobile Tools for Grassroots Programs in Public Health

公共卫生方面的创新往往是自下而上的：新工艺和新技术往往由基层和非政府组织确定，并在当地部署，然后才能得到更广泛的使用。移动技术在加强服务不足人群的卫生系统方面具有巨大潜力，但创新受到创建稳健和可部署解决方案的困难和所需专业知识的阻碍。这项工作旨在通过提供一套基于通用移动设备的工具来改变这种状况，这些工具将使这些组织能够轻松地部署新的卫生服务，监督其提供，改善后勤，评估其规划的有效性，并将其学习和工具传播给世界各地的其他组织。这种方法是基于成本现实主义的，即根据对解决办法在将部署该办法的社区内的可持续性的现实评估，适当地混合技术要素来解决问题。因此，重点是使用一种混合通信设备，这些设备可能已经在目标人口中占有很大比例，例如移动电话。他们还将尝试在移动电话中添加新的传感器设备来进行生理测量。这项协作工作包括适宜卫生技术组织，这是一个特别适合在公共卫生领域实现可扩展技术解决方案的组织。这项研究的目标是了解如何构建移动和云软件，以便更容易地部署模块化应用程序，这些应用程序利用大型社区设计的组件，而不是难以扩展的单一解决方案。通过这种方式，将创建一个繁荣的生态系统，就像今天的应用程序市场一样，具有将模块组合成更大系统的附加功能。评估将包括这些工具在公共卫生背景下的使用情况，以及建立和部署新的信息服务和系统的便利性。鉴于潜在的申请范围广泛，将从各种学科招募学生，包括华盛顿大学医学院、公共卫生学院和信息学院，跨学科项目将被引入本科顶点课程。由于这项工作是多学科的，研究成果也将是多学科的。重点是人机交互、移动系统、通信和软件工程。主要的技术挑战是管理移动数据收集、扩大移动电话的卫生传感/感知能力以及构建分布式信息服务。最重要的是改进组织数据收集运动的方法及其可持续管理，包括在移动设备上部署工具和监督数据收集者本身的工具。将移动电话及其传感器以一种结构化的方式连接起来，将允许使用从纸张和廉价的语音/短信电话到智能手机和平板电脑的所有东西，这将是对数据收集方法的重大贡献。利用基于云的模块之间的标准接口和互联网协议，将使包含工作流程和维持管理反馈循环的数据架构（高于基本数据库）的开发正规化。

Innovation in public health is often bottom up: new processes and technologies are often identified by grassroots and non-governmental organizations and deployed locally before achieving broader use. Mobile technologies have a vast potential to strengthen health systems for under-served populations, but innovation is hindered by the difficulty and expertise required to create robust and deployable solutions. This work seeks to change this state of affairs by providing a set of tools based on commonly available mobile devices that will permit these organizations to easily deploy new health services, supervise their delivery, improve logistics, evaluate their programs' effectiveness, and disseminate their learning and tools to others around the world. The approach is based on cost-realism, namely, the appropriate mix of technology elements to tackle a problem based on a realistic assessment of the solution's sustainability in the community where it will be deployed. Thus, the focus is on using a mix of communication devices that are already likely to be in the possession of a large percentage of the target population such as mobile phones. There will also be experimentation with adding new sensor devices to mobile phones for physiological measurements. This collaborative work includes PATH, an organization uniquely suited to realizing scalable technology solutions in the public health space.The goal of the research is to understand how mobile and cloud software can be constructed to make it easier to deploy modular applications that take advantage of components designed by a large community rather than a monolithic solution that is difficult to extend. In this way, a flourishing ecosystem will be created, much like application markets today, with the added capability of composing modules into larger systems. Evaluation will include both the use of the tools in a public health context as well as the ease with which new information services and systems are built and deployed. Given the wide range of potential applications students will be recruited from a wide variety of disciplines including the University of Washington Medical School, School of Public Health, and Information School and inter-disciplinary projects will be introduced into undergraduate capstone courses.As the work is multi-disciplinary, research results will be as well. The focus is on human-computer interaction, mobile systems, communication, and software engineering. The primary technical challenges are in management of mobile data collection, expanding the sensing/perception capabilities of mobile phones for health, and architecting distributed information services. Improved methods for organizing data collection campaigns and their sustainable management in terms of both the deployment of instruments on mobile devices and tools to supervise the data collectors themselves will be foremost. Connecting mobile phones and their sensors in a structured arrangement that will allow use of everything from paper and cheap voice/SMS phones on one end of the spectrum to smartphones and tablets on the other will be a significant contribution to data collection methods. Exploiting standard interfaces and internet protocols between cloud-based modules will formalize the development of data architectures (above basic databases) that embody work processes and sustain management feedback loops.