The problem – The choice to use paper forms for collecting data is often a matter of convenience in the wired world, but in remote and energy-poor areas of the world they have long been a necessity. The growing ubiquity of mobile phones, even among the poorest of the poor, has a potential to change the way we store and process data and to make life saving information, such as individual medical records, available everywhere someone has a feature phone. One major obstacle to expanding the use of digital records is the potentially high cost of designing new data collection processes and for the conversion of existing data stored on paper to digital format.

The way forward – Researchers at the University of Washington have developed a software application for mobile phones that has the potential to be able to allow someone to scan, digitize, and store information from a paper form simply by taking a picture using the phone’s camera and processing it using their software. A project was funded to help connect their research to real-world use cases so the application can be developed according to specifications generated in the Global South.

Contribution – Proposal review; metric development; budget analysis.