A compression-based mobile data collection system: a test case with climatepal project
Date
2014
Authors
Rutto, Roy
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Strathmore University
Abstract
Data collection is the process of preparing and collecting data as part of
accountability and process improvement. Organizations globally, and
particularly in the developing countries, are being forced to internalize and
account for costs and impacts of environmental and community projects
through monitoring and evaluation. Data collection and aggregation is
conducted for this purpose and is done using various tools, the most common
being paper-based methods.
The use of mobile phones for quick-time data collection is increasing rapidly
around the world. Mobile-based data collection has proven to be a more
efficient tool to perform data collection activities. While current mobile data
collection solutions provide the necessary requirements for data collection, they
are inefficient in terms of network bandwidth consumed during data
transmission, especially when collecting significantly large amounts of data
from a large population and a large number of surveyors. This is because as
quantity of data increases, this increases the amount of data bandwidth,
increasing the time it takes to upload surveys, data bundles consumed and
stretches local memory which is limited. There is need to solve these problems
through implementation of more efficient data collection systems.
This research proposes a mobile-based data collection system that uses data
compression methods in order to improve data collection efficiency. To test the
proposed data collection model a mobile- web based monitoring and evaluation
system was implemented to collect data for an on-going environmental project
by Climate Pal Kenya. The findings indicate the efficiency of this approach for
mobile-based data collection tool and the effectiveness of the chosen data
compression method in reducing the amount of data collected, saving on time,
data transmission costs and device storage.
Description
A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Mobile
Telecommunications and Innovation (MSc. MTI)
Keywords
Data collection, mobile data collection, Research, Climatepal project, storage, bandwidth, upload, compression