PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases
March 2014
http://www.plosntds.org/article/browseIssue.action

Electronic Data Capture Tools for Global Health Programs: Evolution of LINKS, an Android-, Web-Based System
Alex Pavluck mail, Brian Chu, Rebecca Mann Flueckiger, Eric Ottesen
Excerpt
Introduction
The rapid expansion of mobile networks globally, coupled with the decreasing cost of mobile equipment [1], is allowing global health programs increasingly to utilize mobile- and cloud-based technology in their efforts to target important challenges to public health. Our initial electronic data collection system employed personal digital assistants (PDAs) [2], [3], but these proved to have significant cost and scalability limitations. The present report describes a second-generation, more efficient, cloud-based, smartphone-based system and the key elements that lead to its greater efficiency.
The LINKS System
While there are a number of tools available for data collection (EpiCollect, FormHub, EpiInfo, and others), these tools were not ideal for our purposes because of either license restrictions or other challenges. The starting point for the new mobile application, called the LINKS system (Figure 1), was the open source project Open Data Kit (ODK) [4], [5]. ODK allows the collection of a wide range of data using only the internal components of smartphone devices, such as the built-in GPS and the camera that can be used as a barcode scanner.
Data flow from the point of entry (cellular phones/tablets), to encrypted transmission to the cloud, to access and management of the data through a web interface.
A server-based application (app) processes incoming data and writes those data to a database. A dynamic web interface was developed to present the collected data to the user in the form of tables, graphs, maps, and downloadable datasets. The system was deployed on Ubuntu Linux, running on Amazon.com’s Elastic Cloud (AWS EC2, http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/) infrastructure. Geotrust secure certificates were installed to encrypt the data during transmission and between the user’s browser and the server. Data are managed through a web interface or downloaded for offline use outside of the system.
The LINKS system was initially developed to address shortcomings of the earlier PDA-based data-capture systems and to support the interests of the Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs) community in employing an integrated approach to the NTDs using shared technical platforms. The LINKS system can support mobile technology running on a wide range of locally accessible hardware be used in both highly connected (internet) and connection-poor settings have a mechanism to deploy additional surveys to equipment already in the field be built entirely with industry-standard open source software to avoid costly licensing fees be cloud-based to allow for centralized management and increase scalability for large, highly dispersed projects
Since its launch in June of 2011, the LINKS system has been deployed to over 20 countries by multiple partner organizations (Table 1)…