HI all,
I am Chrissy h, [@chrissyhroberts on twitter] an Associate Professor of genetics based in the UK at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
I first got involved in ODK around three years back as we needed to use electronic data collection in some PhD field projects in the Western Pacific. ODK was the obvious choice, being open, free, free the other way and also because we had some experience using it from our work and collaboration with the Global Trachoma Mapping Project
Once we had jumped through the hoops of setting up Aggregate on our institutional computer system, it was a no brainer to let others use it too and since then we've been offering all our staff, students and collaborators access to aggregate servers for use in their own research. In addition to this we have set up a device library, loaning out phones, tablets, power packs, solar chargers and so on. All of this is detailed on the LSHTM Open Data Kit webpage
To date we have deployed aggregate for 80 different research projects, details of which can be found here. All these projects share a common goal, which is to improve global health, but they are really diverse. In Brazil, one group of colleagues is carrying out qualitative research on knowledge and attitudes to entomological surveillance for Zika control. In Guinea, others are trialling Ebola vaccination strategies in social mixing networks. In Vietnam, a project is following research into disability-inclusive social protection systems, whilst my own team is mapping ocular Chlamydia trachomatis infections in Kiribati, Vanuatu, Fiji and the Solomon Islands. We've taken ODK to the most remote places and still managed to get data back to our London hub by dinner time!
In the next year or so we plan to open the service up to academic researchers outside our own institution, so hopefully we will be able to facilitate others to use ODK in universities without having to have the technical skills to set up the server themselves.
Outside of data collection, I spend most of my work time trying to figure out why some people don't get ill, even though they have potentially nasty infections and also developing novel diagnostics for infectious diseases research. I also keep hens.
Fun fact : Eye chlamydia is a thing that affects hundreds of millions of people around the world.
