The use of mobile phones as a data collection tool: a report from a household survey in South Africa

This study investigated the feasibility, the ease of implementation, and the extent to which community health workers with little experience of data collection could be trained and supervised to collect data using mobile phones in a large baseline survey. A Web-based system was developed to allow electronic surveys or questionnaires to be designed on a word processor and conducted on basic mobile phones. This permitted comprehensive daily real-time supervision with no data loss. The system permitted the early detection of data fabrication in combination with real-time quality control and data collector supervision. The benefits of mobile technology, combined with the improvement that mobile phones offer over PDAs in terms of data loss and uploading difficulties, make mobile phones a feasible method of data collection that needs to be further explored.