The origins of Mobile Researcher

Back in 2006, we began work on a solution for conducting surveys using low end mobile phones to assist a South African NGO – the Health Systems Trust – with a rural research project. The solution could not rely on stable network connectivity and needed to support surveys of significant length and complexity.

Over several months we worked closely with them to prototype and test early versions of our mobile application. The project demands pushed the envelope of what was possible with entry level handsets of the time. The rudimentary web-based survey designer also began to take shape.

In the early days, the Mobile Researcher back-end was a PHP/mySQL implementation which utilised the CakePHP framework (a Ruby-on-Rails port). As the solution grew in complexity and response volumes swelled with large scale data collection projects with the Medical Research Council and Human Sciences Research Council, we felt that a migration to a more robust ASP.NET/SQL Server platform was warranted.

Once we migrated to what is now our current architecture, we launched our API which has facilitated the development of bespoke systems, providing capabilities for real-time logistics management, monitoring and evaluation in addition to paperless data collection.

Starting out, we weren’t exactly sure what we’d end up with or even whether what we wanted to achieve would be possible with such limited devices. But now, almost 4 years later, Mobile Researcher is an enterprise level SaaS field research and data collection platform which includes many of the features of solutions designed for “high-end” hardware. Whilst the feature set is continually growing, it’s the simplicity and familiarity of the solution which we keep central as we forge ahead with development.

Tags: Mobile Researcher