2016 ICT4D Conference

Across Sub-Saharan Africa, 65-89% of the national population owns a mobile phone and of those, 80% use them for sending SMS text messages. The ever increasing reach of mobile phones in hard to reach parts of the world has made mobile messaging a valuable tool for conducting health research and interventions. Developed at MIT as a technology to survey human subjects, Nairobi-based mSurvey helps users to understand the attitudes and behaviors of people from varying socioeconomic backgrounds and geographies through 2-way mobile message surveys.

With mSurvey, users are able to develop and edit their own surveys through an online platform, immediately push their surveys to the mobile phones of study participants as SMS text messages at an average response rate of 83%  and then view results in real time through an online dashboard. Study participants take the survey at no cost to them and once completed, receive an automatic airtime incentive sent directly to their phone. Surveys can be sent either to the phone numbers within a user's existing network or to a random selection of mSurvey's audience network comprising over 50,000 participants across five countries.

Health researchers using mSurvey include Harvard Medical School for monitoring adherence to HIV PrEP medication among high risk women in Kenya and Uganda; University of Washington for identifying and predicting peak fertility periods among HIV discordant couples trying to conceive safely in rural Kenya; and University of California San Francisco for following up with pregnant women about the quality of their antenatal, delivery and postnatal care in Kenya.

During this session, attendees will learn more about the mSurvey technology and practice developing and sending mobile surveys to live people in Kenya in real time.