Smartphones are useful for disease surveillance in rural areas, study finds

A mobile phone based system may be a simple and feasible method for disease surveillance in settings with limited resources, such as rural areas, a study has found.

The study was carried out in two districts of Madhya Pradesh, one of India’s largest states with some of the country’s worst health indicator figures.1 It is among the first studies to collect syndromic surveillance data from informal healthcare providers; data collectors were stationed at the clinics of six informal and three formal healthcare providers. They used smartphones to record information …