Episurveyor

From TTC: Mobile Advocacy Toolkit Working Meeting wiki

Collect data on your mobile phone and send it back to a laptop or other computer.

Who's it for; Episurveyor is designed for organisations wishing to undertake surveys in the communities they work with. It was originally designed for organisations working in the health field.

Investment required; Episurveyor is free and there are no subscription fees. As the software currently only runs on Palm handheld computers it is only suited to organisations who wish to undertake large scale, detailed surveying programmes. There is some installation overhead time as the software needs to be installed on a desktop computer in order to create the surveys.

Description:

EpiSurveyor, a free, open-source software suite, is designed to help you collect data using handheld computers and smartphones. It enables anyone to create a handheld data entry form, collect data on a mobile device, and then transfer the data back to a desktop or laptop for analysis.

Episurveyor currently only works on a very limited range of PDA's (see Hardware section below) but is being developed to work on other mobile phone platforms.

EpiSurveyor is a collection of tools which runs on a desktop computer and a Palm handheld computer. It allows for :
- The easy creation of data collection surveys on a Windows desktop or laptop computer
- The use of those surveys to collect data on a Palm handheld computer
- The transfer of collected data back to the desktop for analysis

This can be used for different kinds of survey (eg. public health).

How it works: EpiSurveyor incorporates a Windows-based "Designer" program for the creation of surveys (or for the importation of data from CDC's Epi Info), and a Java-based "Engine" that uses surveys created in Designer to collect data in the field. Both of these programs assume no technical background, no programming skill, and are made to be "word-processor easy" to use.

The process is:

Enter your questions into the Designer program on your desktop or laptop
"Publish" the resulting form to the mobile device(s) (e.g. Palm device)
Gather information on the mobile device(s)
Bring the mobile device(s) back to the computer that has the original form, and synchronize them
The data from all the handhelds will be combined into a single data table which can be exported to a variety of formats for analysis

Website: http://www.datadyne.org/?q=episurveyor/home

Version: 1.2.7 (May 2, 2008)

License: EpiSurveyor Public License v 1.0

Languages: English

System Requirements:

Operating System/s: Windows OS | Palm OS
Hardware: Desktop or laptop computer and a PDA
- Recommended PDA's are
  - Palm Zire
  - Palm Treo smart phones
  - Garmin PDAs with built-in GPS)
  - Choosing Hardware
Additional software/plug-ins required: Java installed in Windows OS