Smartphones more accurate for disease surveillance

Washington, March 13 (ANI): A new study in Kenya has found that smartphone use was cheaper than traditional paper survey methods to gather disease information, after the initial set-up cost.

Survey data collected with smartphones also had fewer errors and were more quickly available for analyses than data collected on paper, according to the study conducted by the Kenya Ministry of Health, along with researchers in Kenya for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Researchers compared survey data collection methods at four influenza surveillance sites in Kenya. At each site, surveillance officers identified patients with respiratory illness and administered a brief questionnaire that included demographic and clinical information.

Some of the questionnaires were collected using traditional paper methods, and others were collected using HTC Touch Pro2 smartphones using a proprietary software program called the Field Adapted Survey Toolkit (FAST).

"Collecting data using smartphones has improved the quality of our data and given us a faster turnaround time to work with it. It also helped us save on the use of paper and other limited resources," said Henry Njuguna, M.D., sentinel surveillance coordinator at CDC Kenya.

A total of 1,019 paper-based questionnaires were compared to 1,019 smartphone questionnaires collected at the same four sites.

Only 3 percent of the surveys collected with smartphones were incomplete, compared to 5 percent of the paper-based questionnaires.

Of the questions that required mandatory responses in the smartphone questionnaire, 4 percent were left unanswered in paper-based questionnaires compared with none of the smartphone questionnaires.

Seven paper-based questionnaires had duplicated patient identification numbers, while no duplication was seen in smartphone data. Smartphone data were uploaded into the database within 8 hours of collection, compared to an average of 24 days for paper-based data to be uploaded.

The cost of collecting data by smartphones was lower in the long run than paper-based methods. For two years, the cost of establishing and running a paper-based data collection system was approximately 61,830 dollars compared to approximately 45,546 dollars for a smartphone data collection system.

The fixed costs incurred when the systems were first set up were 12,990 dollars for paper and16,480 dollars for smartphone.

The study was presented at the International Conference on Emerging Infectious Diseases in Atlanta. (ANI)