Survey Application for the Country of Central America

Client Profile

The Client seeks sustainable solutions for ending hunger and poverty. Client 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. 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

To develop an PDA application to conduct a Survey of household information in the Country of Central America.

Brief introduction of the project

The survey of 20,000 households was already conducted 1 year before in the Country of Central America. However that time, it was not conducted using any software application. This collected Data was made available to us in the form of excel sheets. So our challenge was to preload this data appropriately in our Application database in order to make is available to Survey Application. Data being very huge in terms of volume and also since we wanted to have flexibility of having all the data pre-loaded on every PDA and not to restrict the household survey PDA-wise, it was a major technical challenge for us.

Technical Solution

A PDA Application was designed which can handle preloading of data and making the information of 20,000 households available for comparison for the survey to be conducted this time.
This application is developed in Satellite forms 8.0 technology. We also provided multi-lingual support for English and Spanish languages. The entire survey questionnaire was divided into almost 26 modules. Where these modules had the dependency on each other and required the Application level checks on the same. Within the modules, based on the answers provided to some questions, questionnaire takes various different sets of questions / paths.
Application handled the complexity of linking and storing data per household. This included complete information about all Family Members, their Education Level, their Health, awareness about Nutrition, and Household Expenditure. Also household Gadgets, Electricity Consumption of the household, their Agricultural Properties and Products and Loans. Modes of Transport available and their Social Network.

Challenges