InSTEDD (innovative support to emergencies diseases & disasters) is a non-profit organization focused on improving global health and safety by implementing a blend of social and technical approaches. InSTEDD works closely with communities to identify gaps that can be filled with user friendly tools and services using a socio-technical approach to develop solutions that support health, safety and sustainable development.
In many parts of the world, such as rural Cambodia, voice to voice interaction continues to be the best form of communication between vulnerable groups and health care providers. Cambodians face many barriers when accessing new forms of technology such as smartphones or computers. Literacy & language barriers, along with poor network connectivity, pose as an obstacle when using SMS based mobile applications. In this context it was necessary to develop a solution to reach the large number of users that were being left out because of these barriers.
Verboice was developed in an attempt to overcome literacy gaps, being able to easily reach a large number of users regardless of their technical skills by using plain old phone calls to contact them, and collecting information by simple phone keypad strokes. It can be easily used and configured by an administrator without any technical knowledge, by uploading audio files and visually setting up the workflow that the callee will be guided through. This way, anyone can set up his or her own IVR with ease for collecting information from users via phone. This information can be later downloaded in CSV or synced to Google Fusion Tables for further analysis.
More tweets about VerboiceMobile phone surveys are helping aid workers make real-time decisions during crises: https://t.co/anUxrYMuN3 pic.x.com/qnzyGzDxqL
— Bill Gates (@BillGates) March 19, 2016
We traveled to San Francisco to work with the Red Cross team on the Watchfire tool to improve the timely deployment of volunteers to disaster relief efforts in the San Francisco Bay Area. This was possible thanks to the support of Cisco and the Cisco Foundation who awarded InSTEDD a seed grant to work and help on this issue.
We then travelled to Dhaka, Bangladesh to work with BRAC. The purpose of the trip was to help them evaluate Verboice to support a maternal-child health project called MAMA. In addition to gathering requirements and understanding the needs of the project and the local context, we also provided expertise to establish ISDN and GSM connections to local mobile carriers.
We later participated in the Verboice Tech for Civil Society Organizations workshop held at InSTEDD iLab Southeast Asia offices in Phnom Penh. We worked on gathering feedback from users to improve the platform.
We attended Epihack Tanzania 2014 in Arusha as InSTEDD facilitators of the event. This Epihack, 3rd of its nature, was organized by SACIDS with the support of the Skoll Global Threats Fund. The Epihack was a fantastic event and a truly enriching experience, in which we had the possibility to interact with fellow developers from other parts of the world, observe first-hand the situation of communities in East Africa, and give a helping hand in solving the problem of disease detection. More on our blog.
We trained staff from the mobile Vulnerability Analysis and Mapping (mVAM) project at the World Food Programme (WFP), the food aid arm of the United Nations, on InSTEDD tools in their offices in Rome, in order to cover a number of subjects ranging from basic usage of certain applications to advanced troubleshooting of local installations.
A lot of the successful work we have done aims at bridging information gaps, either by giving a voice to those that cannot be heard or by providing information to people that didn’t have access to it. Two great examples of that, built on Verboice by iLab in South East Asia, are a hotline for factory workers and Reproductive Health hotline.
You can read more at InSTEDD’s website, check this foundational blog post, join the discussion group or start using Verboice right away.
One of the great initiatives that uses Verboice is Baby Monitor. The program takes clinical screening directly to women in the critical period before and after birth by using Verboice to detect complications and take action.
Nicolas di Tada and programmers at InSTEDD and Manas have played a key role through their relentless work to make Verboice the best open source interactive voice response platform out there today.
Eric Green Leader of the Baby Monitor project
This screen contains a project overview along with admin access and a feature to export data.
Tool to define the application’s call flow.
Record audio and messages in the website or upload audios recorded in a phone. The user can also translate the content of each call flow to other languages.
Schedule calls by day & hour and specify retries and delays between calls.
A detailed view of every process executed in the calls.
This project is Open Source, we invite you to collaborate and join us in the development of a better world through the use of technology.
https://github.com/instedd/verboice