Mobile Phone Application Development for Rural Cambodia

By: Phal Des (Cambodia)



Learn about the Project

The work described in this proposal targets the development of mobile phone applications for rural Cambodia – for practicing doctors, farmers and small women-owned businesses (e.g., craft artisans and shop owners). This work comprises research, teaching and outreach. It will be carried out by a team of researchers from one university in Cambodia assisted by a researcher of an American University and a mentor from SIRCA as stated in the call for proposal. The team has previous experience in the domain of m-health (mobile health) and mobile phone application development. Developing mobile phone applications adapted to the Cambodian market is a challenge and an opportunity demanding a deep understanding of the Cambodian reality. The research aspect will look into developing the “right” applications for the targeted population, train the users on these applications and evaluate their impact on the quality of life of the targeted users. Additionally, computer science students, who are also future software developers in Cambodia, need to understand how to develop such applications – from software engineering, technology and social perspectives – because of the new opportunities in this area in their country. In this project we propose to educate Cambodian students of the considered university on the technologies and practices to develop mobile phone applications, and apply their knowledge on a real project. Cambodian professors of the concerned university will be encouraged to integrate mobile phone application development in their respective courses to ensure the sustainability of this initiative. Extensive dissemination of the project, its activities and achievements will be carried out by using a wiki describing the project, creating a ning social network, and presenting at workshops and conferences.

Background
Cambodia. Cambodia has a population of around 14 million people. 35% of the population is living below the poverty line. 81% is living in rural areas. It has a labor force of 7 million people who are mainly living from agriculture (75%) but are only producing 31% of the GDP. The agriculture production is composed of rice, rubber, corn, vegetables, cashews, and tapioca. The industries that are predominant in rural areas are rice milling, fishing, wood and wood products, rubber, cement, and gem mining. Other industries include the flourishing garment industry (350,000 people and 70% of Cambodia’s exports) and tourism to the popular Angkor Wat temple in Siem Riep and to the Phnom Penh Capital City (2 millions of tourists per year). See [1] for more information about these numbers.

Internet and Mobile phones in Cambodia. There are 70,000 Internet users in Cambodia (2007); access to Internet is particularly made possible through the numerous cyber-cafes in the country and the use of mobile phones. A substantial amount of money has been already invested in mobile telecommunication infrastructures and increased competition among providers has decreased the price of communications. Mobile phone subscribers have risen to more than 2.6 millions in 2007 (around 15% of the population owns a mobile phone). Thus, the number of mobile phone lines exceeds the number of land lines (only 37,500 land lines in 2007). Mobile phone coverage is of good quality in Cambodian cities and is expanding to rural areas. 87% of the population is covered by mobile telephony. There are numerous phone booths in rural areas facilitating access to mobile phones to everyone. Cambodians are spending an average of $4 a month on their mobile phones See [1,2] for more information about these numbers.

Context of the Proposal, Related Work and Significance
The easiness of access to mobile phones and their ubiquity are changing the daily lives of people – in the Western world but also (and maybe more) in the developing world. Of course, mobile phones can be used to interact with people by voice and text (e.g., SMS), but they can also be used as cameras, camcorders, music players, to blog (e.g., http://www.twitter.com), to transfer money (e.g., http://www.bekoz.com), to play games (e.g., tetris) and pay taxi fares [3] to cite some examples that are relevant for the developing world. There exist various successful initiatives that look at social impacts of the use of mobile phones. Mobileactive.org is a community that looks at the opportunities of the 3,5 billion mobile phones worldwide “for organizing, communications, and service and information delivery” [2]. M-health (mobile health) is a term for medical and public health practice supported by mobile devices. X out TB is an approach that uses mobile phones to monitor patients treated for tuberculosis (TB) and provides them with incentives (e.g., free mobile phone minutes) to report regularly via SMS [4]. Farmers from different countries are currently benefiting from SMS market information services about the market prices of crops to be able to sell it at the best prices to the best buyers [5].

At the view of these premises, it appears to be more relevant to look at mobile phones rather than traditional desktop/laptop computers for bridging the digital divide and increase the quality of life of people in developing countries – in our case in Cambodia. To go further, mobile phones are now considered as computers and so are in the hands of individuals who may never touch a desktop or a laptop computer. This context creates new opportunities for social changes using mobile phones.

Objectives
The objectives of the current proposal are to:

• Develop a repository of resources composed of links to projects, software and articles to be used by researchers interested in knowing the state of the art in the development of mobile phone applications for doctors practicing in rural areas, farmers and women managing small businesses in villages;
• Create a social network to provide a space of discussion for anybody interested in the use and social impact of mobile phones in Cambodia;
• Develop prototypes of software in Khmer and English for doctors practicing in rural areas, farmers and small women-owned businesses in villages, and evaluate their impact on the lives of these users;
• Educate students and instructors of the considered university in Cambodia on the life cycle of mobile phone application development that will impact lives of people in rural Cambodia; and
• Disseminate our work by proposing workshops and tutorials, and submitting papers to local and international professional, academic and educational conferences.

Research questions
The two main research questions that we will attempt to tackle in this work are:

• How to improve the lives of doctors practicing in rural areas, farmers and women managing small businesses in villages using mobile phone applications?
• How to better prepare computer science students in Cambodia to be skilled and actors of social changes in the view of the growth of mobile telephony?

Findings

With this project, we find out that

First stage

• Most of Cambodian people living in the rural area are illiteracy and isolated from technology.
• Most of Cambodian people are poor at communicating each other and they just use mobile phone for voice call.
• Most of Cambodian people have never used the phone to contact or call hospital or doctor before they go to the hospital. Some people don’t know much about the hospital or health center because they lack information about it before they go.

Second stage

• Young Cambodian people feel embarrassed to talk STDs and seek for information and professional medical treatment service in public because of social-cultural barriers. In contrast, they go to find the unprofessional traditional treatment
• Before, there is no such kind of application on mobile phone that allows users to get information and consult STDs with professional doctors
• The users are satisfied to use this application if it is available in public because the users think that this service is a useful and effective way for them to find the professional advices and treatment of STDs if they have STDs symptoms.
• Some challenges related to sustainability of the application

PI’s Current Progress

The questionnaire was designed to orient toward if there are any changes in users attitude toward STDs after using the application. Particularly, the questions are intended to discover whether the application can reduce the embarrassment of young people in receiving the information about STDs and professional medical treatment service from the doctors. We then did a polite pre-test with 50 students at Royal University of Phnom Penh, aging from 16-25. The students were asked to answers the questionnaire before they were told what application was and given the phones with application to use for a month. The reason of conducting the questionnaire before using the application is to know their attitude toward STDs.

Next, we analyzed the results from pilot test to modify the questionnaire. After a month of using the application, we went to meet them again and asked them to answer the same questions so as to know their attitude toward STDs after using the application so that we can find out the differences of their attitude toward the STDs before and after using the application. We also did the same with 70 high school students and young people in the villages, as shown in Figure b and c.

The final results are shown that:

• Totally there are 120 young people aging between 16-25 years old who used the application and were asked to answer the questions.
• Their awareness of STDs increased. For example before using the application, 82.09% of young people said they were not so clear about STDs. The statistics deceased up to 69.35% after using the application. Moreover, the number of young people who know clearly about STDs increased from 13.43% to 22.58% (Fig.11 and 2).
• The abilities of young people to find the STDs clinics were also up. For example, the statistics of young people who do not know the location of STDs clinics was down from 29.85% to 12.90% and number of young people who know clearly the STDs clinics increased from 14.93% to 16.13% (Fig.1 3 and 4).
• According to the Fig.1 17 and 18, we see that the application helps young people to reduce their embarrassment of getting information about STDs and consulting STDs symptoms with professional doctors. For instance, the number of people who said that the application can reduce their embarrassment increased from 11.95% to 80.64%.
• Also, the number of people who said that m-health lets them know much about STDs is up, namely 1.49% to 33.87% (very much), 13.43% to 45.16 % (much) and 7.46 to 12.90% (normal) (Fig.1 19 and 20).
• The satisfaction of using m-health increased from 13.43% to 50.00% (very much) and from 13.43% to 37.10% (much) (Fig.1 21 and 22).
• Regarding the Fig.1 23 and 24, we see that with the satisfaction of using m-health, most young Cambodian people are willing to pay 1USD for this service if this service is not free of charge in the future.