GPS not finding a location

[Ameera Hamid]

Hi Everyone,

I would just like to know from those of you who make use of the GPS question in the form builder if you have also experienced problems with finding a location when completing forms?  My students are using the GPS to verify their location at their clinical sites everyday on the commcare logbook that i have created, however, many of them, despite having data and turning the GPS on, have struggled to find locations.  They are using the Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 7" tablets.  could it be a tablet problem?  I initially thought it could be a network problem (between vodacom, mtn and cellc), however, all networks have experienced problems recording a location using the commcare app.  Surprisingly though, they are able to send me their location on whatsapp without any hassles.  I have looked at the settings of the tablets to enable proper functioning of the GPS feature in commcare and all the settings comply, so I am unable to figure out why they are having troubling with this feature.  This is a major concern as this is an important component of the logbook for faculty members asnd has also caused a low morale amongst students using the logbooks.

Has anyone experienced similar problems? and how have you remedied it?  

Kind regards,

Ameera

[William Pride]

Ameera,

Are the users able to precisely find their location via GPS in other applications (like Whatsapp or Google Maps)? Its possible these applications are only getting an approximate location via cellular triangulation and CommCareODK will not "accept" these general locations. If you determine that the device is able to get a precise GPS location in other applications then please report a bug through the template mentioned previously and someone on the mobile dev team will take a look.

Best,

Will

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[Cory Zue]

Are there any plans to support "approximate" capture in CommCare?

[William Pride]

Technically this would be trivial, the difficulty is in determining what constitutes an "approximate" vs "exact" location. Before our last GPS overhaul in 2.8 or so the main going concern was that question reported the "Location Successfully Acquired" when you had any location read at all, even if this was very approximate (the order of thousands of meters). Meanwhile, if you wait for an exact location you might hang forever. The solution we arrived at was to add an "acceptable" threshold with distinct messaign in addition to the "exact" threshold that's seemed to work well in general.

I suppose the question here is: do we want to dilute the value of "acceptable" threshold by making it higher and including approximate locations? Maybe we want to add a separate question type for approximate locations instead of exact ones? (though again I think what constitutes an approximate location is very subjective) Or maybe we want to make the thresholds configurable via HQ?

Not sure this is the right forum to address these questions but I'm open to hearing ideas and opinions

[Cory Zue]

On Tue, May 13, 2014 at 1:05 PM, William Pride <wpr...@dimagi.com> wrote:

Technically this would be trivial, the difficulty is in determining what constitutes an "approximate" vs "exact" location. Before our last GPS overhaul in 2.8 or so the main going concern was that question reported the "Location Successfully Acquired" when you had any location read at all, even if this was very approximate (the order of thousands of meters). Meanwhile, if you wait for an exact location you might hang forever. The solution we arrived at was to add an "acceptable" threshold with distinct messaign in addition to the "exact" threshold that's seemed to work well in general.

I suppose the question here is: do we want to dilute the value of "acceptable" threshold by making it higher and including approximate locations? Maybe we want to add a separate question type for approximate locations instead of exact ones? (though again I think what constitutes an approximate location is very subjective)

 

Or maybe we want to make the thresholds configurable via HQ?

This makes the most intuitive sense to me, since each project may have different requirements about how precise they need that number to be.

[Amelia Sagoff]

Hi Ameera,

If configurable limits for accuracy of GPS capture sounds good to you, you can request it on our uservoice forum for CommCare Mobile: http://dimagi.uservoice.com/forums/194737-commcare-mobile

Based on how many votes it gets we will plan to put it on a future mobile release.

Thanks,

Amelia

[Ameera Hamid]

I think making the threshold configurable would be a good idea and i see that Amelia has posted a link for me to vote for that option.  In the short term is there anything that can be done abut it?

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[Ameera Hamid]

Thanks Amelia, will do so!

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[Clayton Sims]

Ameera,

Until we've had a chance to update the UI:

The coordinates captured by CommCare are formatted as a space separated list of values like

42.3331109 -71.0532241 0.0 769.0

The final value in that list should be the accuracy of the coordinate. 

You could add a validation condition to the question reads the last item and compares it to your minimum accuracy using the expression

if( . = '' , true(), int(selected-at(., 3) ) < 100)

which would evaluate that the accuracy was better than 100 meters, but this would never allow the user to proceed if they couldn't acquire an accuracy that was sufficient

-Clayton

[Clayton Sims]

Ameera,

To clarify a bit because in retrospect this is a bit confusing:

In my workaround above: the constraint message there would show up after the user has already confirmed to select Location Data. When they return to the form with the "Capture Location" button, that screen would give them an error that notifies them that their location is not accurate enough (expressed through the validation condition message) and they would need to click the button once again to try to receive a better location.

-Clayton

[Ameera Hamid]

Hi Clayton,

Thanks for the clarification. I will test it out in field and see how that works with the project

Many thanks
Ameera