Mobile/PDA based survey application for pump adoption and Impact of Metering study

Client Profile

Client company is one of 15 international research centers supported by the network of 60 governments, private foundations and international and regional organizations. Research is the core activity. The research agenda is organized around four priority themes including Water Availability and Access; Productive Water Use; Water Quality, Health and Environment; and Water and Society. They work through collaborative research with many partners in the North and South and targets policy makers, development agencies, individual farmers and private sector organizations.

Purpose

The purpose is to develop a survey application for pump adoption and Impact of Metering study. This will reduce data entry in the survey form in paper format and have secure storage of data collected by invigilators from various places thus reducing the risk of human errors. This should give benefit in significant cost savings on recurring expenditure – cost of paper, postage / fax, copying etc – and administrative resources.

Business Need

Currently the client has a set of invigilators. Each invigilators used to take survey / audit of approximately 30 household in one day .The data collected in an audit / survey used to be filled in a paper form and sent to central processing centre via Fax. Thus, on an average, 30 forms were sent by Fax by every invigilator in a day. This counts to approximately 5250 paper forms in any given week across the organization. In order to manage this the data received by Fax, there was a practical need of having an application which will allow invigilators to send, organize and process the data collected in the survey via PDA / mobile phone.

Technical Solution

A mobile application for PDA / mobile phone which will be used by a person engaged in survey. This PDA application allows the invigilators to enter answers to survey questionnaire. On the completion of survey, the devices will upload the data (sdf files) of individual PDA for export. In export utility the data will be processed and output in Excel format will be generated for further analysis.

The entire application includes the following elements:

  • A custom Windows Mobile application will have different questions framed in modules.
  • Export utility is a windows utility to transfer data collected from PDA’s into excel sheets so this data can be used for analysis.

Features

  • Manual data entry in the audit form in paper format is no longer needed, cutting out the opportunity for human error and freeing up significant resources.
  • Extremely fast form filling process used by the invigilators by the provision of an intuitive, streamlined and automated means of entering the data using PDA / mobile devices.
  • The client benefited from significant cost savings on recurring expenditure – cost of paper, postage / fax, copying etc – and administrative resources.
  • Utilization of latest technology gave a competitive advantage and good market positioning to the client.
  • Ability to switch quickly back and forth between modules.
  • Ability to edit households that need further action.
  • Dashboard view to show the completion status of each module, as soon the invigilator opens the application.

Tools and technologies used for implementation of website architecture

Technology used
  • VS2005 with .NET framework 3.0
  • Windows Mobile SDK 5.0
  • SQL Server CE 3.0

Details
The application is developed with VS2005 with Windows Mobile 5.0 Pocket PC. UI forms are kept in the project folder.

About Survey instrument: This survey is done for the pump adoption and Impact of Metering Study having following 6 modules:

  • Identity: This includes the details of the individual household, survey invigilator information, date of interview, time of interview and etc.
  • General and Agricultural Information: This includes the details of sources of income, government programs adopted of agriculture, land ownership, types of crops sowed in different season in a year, agricultural assets used or owned, irrigational equipments used and crop economics etc. And depending on the water usage status (WUS) which we get from matrix of the irrigation equipments and the ownership (individually owned, shared, rent out, rent in), WEM status is maintained and used further.
  • Water extraction mechanisms (WEMs): This section includes the detailed information of all irrigational equipments, like hours of operation in a season of a year, number of days equipments are operational, electricity consumption etc.
  • Water sellers: This section related to water selling data with details of the pump based on WEM.
  • Water Buyer’s: This section related to water buying data with details of the pump based on WEM.
  • Procurement of inputs: This section has detailed information about fertilizers used, hybrid and high yielding variety of seeds, pumps and spare parts, electrification of pumps depending on WEM, Marketing channel of food grains and prevailing rates in that year, awareness of groundwater laws, permits and registration regulations.