Android Smart Phone

Most smart phones will have a GPS receiver included regardless of their operating system. Since CartONG has so far worked with Androids for mapping and data collection only, other smart phone systems like the I-Phone or Blackberry are not mentioned here.

]The smart phones come pre-installed with GPS tracking applications, however, most of them require the phone to be online on a WIFI or subscribed to a data flat to work. There are many offline GPS applications out there, but it will require a little more effort to find those and install them. Apart from GPS Test to initialize a phone and get a good idea how many satellite are out there to be connected to, CartONG has mainly utilized OSM Tracker for mapping and had very good results with it. Some material on our experiences can be found on our Android Project page.

Additionally, we have successfully used ODK Collect Android application for surveys in nutrition, public health and household registration. Whereas the setting up of ODK does require some initial technical input, after specifying the SOPs and training the enumerators, supervisors and survey managers, it was found that it can run without technical staff monitoring it. Please find more material and reports on http://humanitarian-android.org/ODK.