Getting data from phones without any internet

[em...@aquaya.org]

Hi CommCare Users,

We have a team of enumerators in a very remote part of Tanzania with no internet connectivity whatsoever, so they haven't been able to upload any data.  However, due to some issues with the study, we need to access just the GPS coordinates they've collected through their forms (to give to another team to go back to the same places).

I've seen the options for remote data submission (wifi-direct and sd cards), however, due to the extreme remoteness, we won't be able to get a host device back to somewhere with internet before we need the coordinates.  Is there any way to get just a single question the phones directly?  The only way we've come up with so far is to manually go through the forms on each phone and write down the coordinates - however, it's nearing 100 forms. Any thoughts/ideas would be appreciated!

Thanks!

Emily 

[William Pride]

Emily,

Unfortunately there're not many great, turn-key solutions for what you're trying to do within CommCare. Most of our workflows for data analysis require submitting to CommCareHQ at some point in the process.

Depending on how comfortable your team is with coding, you might be able to design a process that leverages the SD card dump or Wi-Fi direct process and a home-made script to pull all of this data. However, you will still need a host device to visit all the enumerators and gather their forms. Further, you would be responsible for building and using the script (IE we would not be able to provide much support on any issues that arise in this part of the process) so you'll need a quite tech savvy team.

If you're interested in pursuing this option please email me directly (wpr...@dimagi.com) and I can go into more detail.

Best,

Will

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[Clayton Sims]

Emily,

I'll let you follow up with will on this one, but I did wanna throw out there that there are a couple of ways that CommCare can help facilitate data transfer offline for very small amounts of data.

For instance: If you have a case on device A and all you want to do is pass that record to another device, you could collect the GPS Coordinate on the first device and save that data to a case on the device.

You can then create a form a Hidden Value that is loaded with the case coordinate, then create a Label question and scroll to the bottom of the "advanced" section where it says "Add other Content", and click "custom". set the custom type to be 

qrcode

and fill it in with the coordinate like

<output ref="/data/coordinate_hidden_value"/>

This will make that phone display the coordinate data as a QR Code on the screen

The other phone can scan the code using the Barcode Scan question type (in the Advanced section of the widget ribbon) and load it into a case it creates for the location. The point can then be mapped as usual.

-Clayton

[Emily Kumpel]

Hi Clayton and Will,

Thanks so much for the followup.  Will had suggested a workflow that could have worked, and the qrcode suggestion is neat and I feel like will be useful for another project coming up.

Given that the data are already on the phones and we need to get in this done within the next week (and lack of capacity to trouble-shoot in the field), we’ve decided for the moment that the team will try to get transport to a place with cell signal, or they’ll manually go through the forms on the phone.

Thanks for recommendations! These will likely come in handy in the future, especially if we plan them in advance.

Emily

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