An efficient SMS-based framework for public health surveillance

Public health surveillance is the ongoing systematic collection, analysis and interpretation of health-related data. It serves as an early warning system for impending public health emergencies. This paper presents an efficient framework for automated acquisition and storage of medical data using the infrastructure provided by Short Message Service (SMS). The data to be collected are dynamically organized by constructing form components (text-field, date-field, pull-down menu, radio-button, check-box, etc.) which is designed by an administrator as well as privileged users at the field level. On demand, the form components can be downloaded from the server to the mobile devices in the form of SMS. The SMS contains a structured EXtensible Markup Language (XML) specifying the layout of the form. After the medical data is acquired, an SMS containing the structured data is sent to the server which stores it into the database. Finally, the server sends an acknowledgment SMS to the mobile on successful storage of the data. The proposed SMS based framework provides a low-bandwidth, reliable, efficient and cost effective solution for medical data acquisition as demonstrated by experimental results.