Open Data Kit: Applications Of Mobile Devices In The Developing World

Since 2008, we have been applying smartphones and tablets to problems in the developing world in the domains of public health, environment monitoring, agriculture, and human rights monitoring (among others). The Open Data Kit (opendatakit. org) collection of modular tools for both client and server-side functions has been highly successful with tens of thousands of users in hundreds of organization on six continents. In this keynote, I will describe what we believe to be the principal features of this success, namely: (1) tackling real problems within a context of participatory design; (2) creating an open source community and ecosystem of companies around the tools; and (3) generalization of the modules so they can be easily adapted to different contexts. I will also argue that this line of problem-solving leads to explorations of different regions of the design space than would occur in the developed world due to the particular constraints that must be satisfied. Finally, I will conclude with some recommendations for the ubicomp community.