Mobiles Combat Kenyan Polio Outbreak

According to this news report, a mobile phone-based health application has helped to investigate and contain a polio outbreak in Kenya, East Africa. As stated here, "health officials in Kenya used the... application EpiSurveyor after refugees fleeing violence in Somalia introduced the first case of polio into the country in more than 20 years. The application can be downloaded onto handheld devices to log patients' symptoms and any treatment they receive. Kenyan health workers modified the survey forms used by EpiSurveyor to track an emergency vaccination campaign... to stop a potential epidemic."

EpiSurveyor is funded by the United Nations (UN) and Vodafone Foundation Technology Partnership, which is using strategic technology programmes to strengthen UN
humanitarian efforts worldwide. The World Health Organization (WHO) has announced that it is expanding the project to another 20 countries in Africa.

The application, which is free to use and run on an open-source platform, was used by health officials to collate information on the disease, such as patient symptoms, treatment, levels of medical supplies, and areas that needed vaccines. Questionnaires were formulated and sent out to health workers instantaneously via mobile networks to obtain real-time information on the progress of the outbreak and emergency vaccination programme.

Joel Selanikio, co-founder of DataDyne.org, which designed EpiSurveyor, stated that because the application is open source, he was first contacted by an organisation wishing to modify the application for their purposes, and "the fellow that I was speaking to said we could add those features and give me the modified code so that I could incorporate it into the general code base." He believes that as the application is used more widely, more people will help to improve and adapt the computer code to their own needs.