An application for household registration of births and deaths is being developed in a project under the umbrella of the UN Millennium Project.

Brian DeRenzi, a graduate student in computer science at the University of Washington in the US, is helping test the application as it is being fine tuned at a health facility in Uganda.

In Uganda, DeRenzi says, there are community health workers who go from house to house to collect health information and do health promotion. The goal is to enable those health workers to use the service to register births and deaths on their mobiles and send the information to a central database via GPRS.

“We’ve learned a lot, done a lot of programming and improved the application substantially during the period I’ve been here. The ambition is to have a pilot ready to be used on the field early 2009,” DeRenzi says.

Connectivity can be a big problem in African rural areas, DeRenzi says. As a consequence, the birth and death register application has been designed so that entered data can be saved and sent later when, and where, the connectivity is better, such as on top of a hill.

Another big challenge, DeRenzi says, is the user base: “While almost all of the community health workers we are working with have used a mobile phone, most have only used the most basic models. I don't think any of them have used GPRS before, nor did they have experience with running custom applications.”

The application is built on JavaROSA, which is a J2ME application for data handling built by the OpenROSA consortium, a community formed by a number of groups to create open source, standards-based tools for mobile-data collection, aggregation, analysis, and reporting.

“Approximately 99 percent of the code we are using is JavaROSA. We’ve just done some small additions on top of that,” DeRenzi says. “Since it is built on J2ME, it can run on most mobile devices.”

JavaROSA is being tested with a number of different projects, in Africa as well as in other parts of the world, DeRenzi says. It has so far mainly been used for health-care applications, although it is suitable for a range of other purposes, such as agriculture and microfinance.

DeRenzi has recently started working on his PhD. His research area is tools for mobile devices for health-care workers in low-income countries. He hopes his work will inspire other developers to join the OpenROSA collaboration to work with mobile health-care applications, or other types of applications contributing to a more sustainable society.

“That would be wonderful,” he says.

Ericsson sponsors the Millennium Project by boosting the networks in the Millennium Villages and provides mobile telephones from Sony Ericsson.

By Benny Ritzén

Related links
Read more about the Millennium Project
Ericsson joins new UN initiative to bring digital-health benefits to Africa
See Brian DeRenzi’s home page
Find out more about the OpenROSA community