Mobile Researcher - Community Newsletter #4
Introducing Mobenzi, new features, and exploring possibilities of the Mobile Researcher API
Introducing Mobenzi and its research significance
Mobenzi empowers people to earn income for completing simple tasks on their mobile phones. These tasks involve certain types of problems that are difficult for a computer to solve without assistance from a real person – even someone without expert knowledge of the problem.
There are a wide variety of commercially valuable tasks that workers (so-called Mobenzi agents) can perform, including transcription, content filtering, classification, and sentiment rating - all of which can be hugely beneficial to a research project as well.
Many aspects of the research process cannot be easily automated and accomplished using software alone, particularly when conducting qualitative research. One area in particular where we believe Mobenzi offers an exceptional tool for researchers is in conducting surveys via SMS. Traditionally, when it comes to gathering data via SMS, researchers have two rather ungainly options if they wish to collect anything more than the simplest one word response:
- Option 1: Require that respondents structure their feedback in some way (e.g. comma delimited) or;
- Option 2: Solicit answers one SMS at a time, with responses still needing to be confined to a reasonably limited vocabulary.
But what if you could pose a question (or several questions) on a poster, billboard, flyer, radio ad or SMS and allow respondents to answer in free text - but still be able to analyse the data using quantitative techniques? That's precisely what SMS Insight, an experimental service powered by Mobenzi offers: the ability to derive structured results from free text responses.
Find out how leveraging the abilities of real people can provide much-needed employment and create business value on the Mobenzi blog and contact us if you're interested in helping us validate the concept - we're actively seeking data for our agents to crunch - and thanks to our funding from the Business Trust can offer this service free for a limited period.
New feature highlights
It's always gratifying to be able to announce new features - particularly long awaited ones. Here are a few features now available as of version 3.1.19 of the mobile application:
- Survey resumption - you can now suspend and resume a survey midway: handy if a fieldworker needs to switch to another application urgently or the handset battery dies during an interview.
- Location - if the handset is GPS-enabled, the location of the survey is mapped and the GPS coordinates are available when exporting.
- Image capture - on certain handsets, you can now take photos during the survey.
- Single response surveys - in certain scenarios, you may want a fieldworker to complete a survey only once (a staff evaluation form for example). If configured, when a fieldworker completes such a survey, it will be automatically removed from the handset upon completion.
We'll discuss each of these features in more detail in future blog posts in the Mobile Researcher Community. For assistance with upgrading your handsets to the latest version of the mobile application, please contact support@mobileresearcher.com.
Infinite possibilities with the Mobile Researcher API
A good API, or Application Programming Interface, allows systems to communicate and share information with each other through a well-defined, secure and flexible protocol. Providing an API is important because it allows programmes developed by different parties to talk to each other and work together seamlessly - even though they may have be implemented by unrelated teams and with completely different technologies. It encourages integration and reduces reliance on a single module by enabling it to be substituted without affecting the broader system. And it enables custom functionality, not catered for by one system, to be provided by another.
If you're a technical reader, our API guide provides a great introduction to the full set of functionality accessible via the Mobile Researcher API.
We put a lot of focus on making the Mobile Researcher API generic and providing an open development platform and will continue to do so as we feel that an enterprise-level mobile data collection platform is just a building block in creating end-to-end solutions which can differ dramatically from one project to the next.
The API currently facilitates integration in 3 key ways:
- It allows you to query Mobile Researcher at will for data in exceptionally flexible ways - almost as though it were your own database.
- When a response is received, modified or deleted, Mobile Researcher can be configured to notify multiple systems which can then perform any custom action based on the content of the response.
- As a fieldworker checks for survey updates (from the mobile application), Mobile Researcher can be configured to notify a third-party system which can override a template, or generate multiple instances of it, before being sent to the fieldworker.
By combining these integration capabilities, Mobile Researcher can act as a platform on which complex management systems can be built which handle all manner of data-driven functionality such as scheduling, quality assurance, automated reporting, issue escalation, reminders and just about anything else a project might require.
By leveraging the API, a simple mobile phone can now be used to not only capture data, but also access existing data. This unlocks enormous potential for longitudinal studies, participant or customer record look-up applications, household or facility follow-ups or any application where data held in a central system would be valuable in the field.
We've already mentioned that we built Mobenzi using the Mobile Researcher API. In our next newsletter we'll highlight some other case studies to illustrate what we and others have done using the API.
Did you know...?
- The longest single survey currently being conducted using Mobile Researcher is 406 data fields.
- The most common handset in use is the Nokia 1680 Classic.
- One fieldworker submitted over 8,000 responses in under 12 months.
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