Looking for developers to help out

[Angelo Juan O. Ramos]

I'm looking for developers to help us customize Frontline SMS for a maternal health care program here in the Philippines. Perhaps we can get it touch with those who are here in the country, or with other kind-hearted folks out there who'd want to help out on-line. If you're interested, we can exchange contact details and do Skype or something similar.

Thanks!

[Anthony Papillion]

Hey Angelo,

I'm interested in helping out. I'm in the U.S. but have worked remotely on projects for years, Connect with me on skype at CajunTechie or you can SMS me at +1.918.926.0139 or email [e-mail]

[Angelo Juan O. Ramos]

Thanks Anthony. We're trying to customize the look, feel and some fields in FrontlineSMS. Do we need special permission to do this?
For example, we'd like to put in some logos of the province where we will test the system, so if the provincial seal can be featured on the Home page, that would be nice.

We would also like to customize the fields that need to be filled up under "contact details" on New Contacts.

We plan to test an SMS-based system for delivery of maternal heatlh care services in impoverised, far-flung areas in the Philippines. We will do this by sending periodic text reminders to pregnant women to go for pre-natal check-ups, send health messages. We also want women to register by SMS to the service, so that they can be part of a database where they can receive auto-text messages. We also plan to include a component where field health workers can also send field data to the system via SMS, which can be captured and stored in a database, and used for statistical analysis. Finally, the auto-forwarding feature can be used so that emergency text messages (i.e. a mother about to give birth will text a special keyword, and the system will then forward this to a doctor or paramedic).

*whew* I hope this has captured what we wish to accomplish. Let me know how you can help us out, and this would be highly appreciated. Just e-mail me at ajoramos[at]gmail.com. Thanks!

[Anthony Papillion]

Angelo,

You can make any changes you like to the source code of FrontlineSMS as it's an open source project. No special permissions or notifications needed. However, if you happen to make some particularly useful changes to the software's functionality, consider sending them to Ken to see if he could use them in the main project. Code contribution is one of the major ways an open source project grows and becomes better.

As for the other things you discussed, all pretty straightforward stuff to do as long as you have the equipment and skillset. You can handle registration a few ways:

1. Let FrontlineSMS handle keeping track of people who text in to register or

2. Pipe their registration text to an external program to store in a db somewhere outside of FrontlineSMS.

For your needs, option 1 sounds like the best way but if you want to provide a higher level of functionality that what you're saying, the system would be very easy to extend using external programming.

Modifying the forms will be simple. Simple Java code change there, no big deal at all.

I'm open to helping in any way I can from programming the changes to training you guys on FrontlineSMS. Just get in touch at anthonyp[at]openemrhq.com and we'll get started.

Good luck! Keep us all abreast of how the project is going.

Anthony Papillion

[Ben Whitaker]

Hi Angelo,

I'd back up everything that Anthony has said, and will fill in a few more details:

Some of the features you are asking for are already present in FLSMS, others are still in development.

1: Registration via SMS: already in, just create the keywords JOIN and LEAVE (or whatever you like) and make people that send them in auto-added and auto removed from a group that you created for the purpose.
But as Anthony said, if you have an external program managing the SMS reminder sending, you may be better to also send the join requests to the external program. The good thing about FLSMS is that a keyword can run multiple actions, so it can manage groups inside frontline, and also send a notification to an external program or website at the same time.

2: Periodic reminders: not currently implemented, but there have been several requests for scheduled messages, or messages driven from an external system. The next major release of FLSMS, (with an estimated due date of late July?), will have the ability for external programs or scheduled tasks to request SMS be sent by FrontlineSMS. This will still mean that you need some sort of external program or script to manage the scheduled events, so FLSMS will not do it all for you yet.
It us useful to see the user story that you mentioned, so that it can guide the developers better in their thinking about what people may need, and we'll add it to the thinking about including scheduled actions inside FLSMS in the future.

3: External data gathering to database: Have you tried FrontlineForms? This gives you a program on your data gathering phones that lets people gather data off-line, even filling in multiple forms at the same time, and then submitting them via SMS to FrontlineSMS, which enters them into the FrontlineSMS database, where you can view or export it as raw data or statistical aggregated data to preserve privacy. See Ville's Introduction to Forms to get a better idea.


4: Auto-forwarding: already supported, just create a keyword!
You could even have your "on Call Doctors" group which gets sent the emergency SMS managed by ONCALL or OFFDUTY keyword so that doctors/nurses can join and leave the emergency hotline when they are on and off duty just by sending an SMS!

5: Changing the logos on the Home Page without being a programmer: might be in the next version, not so sure yet - we're making changes to the home page logo anyway to enable better support for small screen computers like the EEPC so we may be able to do that at the same time, but I can't promise.

6: Changing the contacts fields: can you give some more details about what it is you'd like to do, and whether you wish for people to send an SMS with this extra detail, or you will be entering this direct into FLSMS with mouse and keyboard?

*whew*

So - FrontlineSMS does a lot of stuff already, but someone will still need to do a bit of programming (in any language you like) to make the scripts to manage the auto-reminders for mothers at different stages in their pregnancy. Are you able to wait until late July for the required external commands to be added to enable your external programs to send the scheduled messages?

I'm assuming they text in with their last menstruation date to synchronise the service with their pregancy's expected timeline?

A developer that has already described and prototyped such a due date predicting system was James BonTempo, in his video about external commands, so have a watch of that to understand how it all fits together.

[Angelo Juan O. Ramos]

Hi Ben,

You've sent us a gold mine! Appreciate it a lot, and your suggestions will be quite helpful for us.

I'm looking forward to the next update of FLSMS, which you say will include the capacity to send out scheduled messages. Since our project focuses on pregnant women, it would be great that based on the initial dating of the mother's pregnancy, we can automatically track the progress, and thus send pertinent messages at specific times (i.e. the trimesters and the need to go for pre-natal check-up).

We're also planning to see how we can change the contact fields to include not only the name and mobile number of the patient, but also other info such as their location in the municipality, gravida/para, and current age of gestation (AOG). I need to know if it's possible that the system can thus update the AOG, because obviously, the pregnancy progresses. We also want to put in information on whether or not the pregnancy is high-risk.

We don't plan to make use of Frontline Forms for now, because it requires Java-enabled phones. Our patients are typically rural womenfolk who usually own the cheapest, simplest phones. Thus, we will only focus on using SMS. Having said that, can FLSMS handle a text message containing 2 or more keywords and their responses, and can it send that info to the database for eventual transfer and analysis?

*whew*

We'll update you guys over the next week or so what we've managed to do. I'm eager for the new version!

[Ben Whitaker]

Hi Angelo - just to clarify:

the next version won't look after your scheduled responses for you, but it will allow an external program that is driven by scheduled events to send messages.

The SMS based data gathering (without java) for multiple fields into a database is another thing we need to consider in the future - it's not handled yet.
Also the contacts fields stuff - but the notes field could be used for a short-term solution?

Will have a chat with Ken and some of the other developers about where these requests fit.

[Sarah]

Hi Angelo,
Can't say that I can help you out with customizing Frontline SMS right now, but I'd love to have some dialogue with you regarding using Frontline SMS for maternal healthcare. I'm a grad student looking to use it for maternal and reproductive health in Africa for my practicum project. My email is [e-mail] if you'd like to drop me a line and give me an idea of what you're up to!

Thanks so much,
Sarah

[kiwanja]

Hi Sarah

You might also want to search out Josh Nesbit on the community pages here. He's been doing a lot of work with FrontlineSMS in health, initially in Malawi. He has a couple of videos in the "Video" section. His website is http://www.jopsa.org

I'm sure between him and Angelo/Anthony, you should be able to come up with something quite interesting, I think. =)

Good luck!

Ken

[Angelo Juan O. Ramos]

Hi Sarah,

Thanks for your interest. I'm glad we're both focusing on maternal & reproductive health care. We're trying to see if we can use FrontlineSMS as a tool to deliver timely reminders and health information to pregnant women in some pilot sites in our country. This is basically a research initiative, and we're approaching the whole project holistically - software, hardware, policy, HR, behavior, primary health care, etc. I'd also love to get an idea of what you're doing over there. Cheers!
Angelo

[Deep]

Hi Angelo,

I am a physician with interests in public health and considering a project aroung maternal and child health.

Just wanted to know if you could succeed in using FSMS for your project. Even I also need some external support for scheduling the SMS reply and to use our own database with MySQL.

Looks like you have already tried it. Can you share your experience.

Thanks,
Deep.

[Anthony Papillion]

Hi Deep,

I'm sure Angelo will reply on his own but I wanted to jump in here and comment too as I've done quite a few FLSMS installations that used MySQL and other technologies to complement the SMS system provided by FLSMS.

Integrating FLSMS with MySQL and just about any other technology is very simple. FLSMS allows you to pass incoming data to an outside program and, then, that program can do whatever it wants with that information such as querying a database, doing some sort of web search, whatever you want. FLSMS just acts as the router for SMS in cases like this, routing messages between the outside users mobile and your program that processes the messages those users send.

In many cases, entire systems can be designed in under a week. Take, for example, the FamilyFirst system I designed for a local crisis center. The system allows two way SMS communication, logging, database communication, and a few other things, all by using FLSMS, a few PHP scripts, and a database.

If you'd like some help, get in touch with me at [e-mail] and I'd be happy to offer some guidance, answer questions, whatever you need.

Anthony

[Thor Remoblas]

Hi!

I'm a developer (windows / web; albeit in my spare time only), and am very much interested would like to help out in whatever way I could. At the moment though, I'm currently busy with the preparations of a national event to be held in Cebu in November, so for the next 6 - 8 weeks, my hands are practically tied, but will be practically free from around the 3rd week of November to about February.

My YM: tremoblas [at] yahoo [dot] com


P.S.

I'm usually invisible while online via YM. If I respond within 2 minutes, I'm really online. :D