Using Mobile Phone Data Collection Tool, Surveda, for Noncommunicable Disease Surveillance in Five Low- and Middle-income Countries

Abstract

Objectives: The Noncommunicable Disease (NCD) Mobile Phone Survey, a component of the Bloomberg Philanthropies Data for Health Initiative, determines the prevalence of NCDs and their associated risk factors and demonstrates the use of mobile phone administered surveys to supplement periodic national household surveys. The NCD Mobile Phone Survey uses Surveda to administer the survey; Surveda is an open source, multi-modal software specifically developed for the project. The objective of the paper is to describe Surveda, review data collection methods used in participating countries and discuss how Surveda and similar approaches can improve public health surveillance.
 Methods: Surveda features full-service survey design and implementation through a web application and collects data via Short Messaging Service (SMS), Interactive Voice Response (IVR) or mobile web. Surveda’s survey design process employs five steps: creating a project, creating questionnaires, designing and starting a survey, monitoring survey progress, and exporting survey results.
 Results: The NCD Mobile Phone Survey has been successfully conducted in five countries, Zambia (2017), Philippines (2018), Morocco (2019), Malawi (2019), and Sri Lanka (2019), with a total of 23,682 interviews completed.
 Discussion: This approach to data collection demonstrates that mobile phone surveys can supplement face-to-face data collection methods. Furthermore, Surveda offers major advantages including automated mode-switch, question randomization and comparison features.
 Conclusion: Accurate and timely survey data informs a country’s abilities to make targeted policy decisions while prioritizing limited resources. The high acceptance of Surveda demonstrates that the use of mobile phones for surveillance can deliver accurate and timely data collection.

Examination of the demographic representativeness of a cross-sectional mobile phone survey in collecting health data in Colombia using random digit dialling

“…Different from other studies published in LMIC,4 20 23 43 the current study found that women were the most represented population group in our data. This may be related to the fact that women are more willing to answer this type of survey 44.…”

“…Consequently, they are conducted infrequently due to high costs related to personnel and transportation 1. Moreover, conducting household surveys are more challenging in security risk areas or when epidemiological (eg, pandemics) conditions change 3 4. Alternative or supplemental data collection methodologies have emerged to address some of these challenges 4 5…”

“…Taking advantage of the high penetration of mobile phones globally and in LMICs, research shows there are increasing efforts to introduce MPS, which includes short message service, interactive voice response (IVR), and computer-assisted telephone interviews (CATI), survey modalities13 14 for more cost-effective and rapid data collection 4 15…”

“… 3 4 Alternative or supplemental data collection methodologies have emerged to address some of these challenges. 4 5 …”

A nationwide mobile phone survey for tobacco use in Tanzania: Sample quality and representativeness compared to a household survey

“…If you are a female, press 2”). IVR has been used to collect nationally representative estimates of demographic and health indicators ( Song et al, 2020 ). However, the representativeness, reliability, or how the prevalence estimates reported by IVR differ from the nationally representative data collected by household face-to-face surveys, the gold standard, have not been well studied in many countries.…”