Abstract
Many global development agencies self-report their project outcomes, often relying on subjective data that is collected sporadically and communicated months later. These reports often highlight successes and downplay challenges. Instrumented monitoring via distributed data collection platforms may provide crucial evidence to help inform the sector and public on the effectiveness of aid, and the on-going challenges. This paper presents the process of designing and validating an integrated sensor platform with cellular-to-internet reporting purposely targeted at global development programs. The integrated hardware platform has been applied to water, sanitation, energy and infrastructure interventions and validated through laboratory calibration and field observations. Presented here are two examples: a water pump and a household water filter, wherein field observations agreed with the data algorithm with a linear fit slope of between 0.91 and 1, and an r-squared of between 0.36 and 0.39, indicating a wide confidence interval but with low overall error (i.e., less than 0.5% in the case of structured field observations of water volume added to a household water filter) and few false negatives or false positives.
Highlights
Access to improved drinking water, sanitation systems and clean burning stoves could benefit the billions who suffer from diarrheal disease and pneumonia, two of the leading causes of death around the world for children under five [1]
This paper discusses the development and validation of fully integrated data acquisition system designed for application in international development programs, including household water filters and community water pumps
The technology has been demonstrated to provide high quality data remotely, and to closely track behavior that is otherwise difficult to evaluate through surveys and observations
Summary
Access to improved drinking water, sanitation systems and clean burning stoves could benefit the billions who suffer from diarrheal disease and pneumonia, two of the leading causes of death around the world for children under five [1]. While there have been many efforts, large and small, designed to address these challenges, the majority of international development programs self-report project outcomes through person-to-person surveys that assess adoption of a particular program or technology These surveys often overestimate adoption rates due to reporting bias where the participant is trying to please the surveyor or recall problems where the participant does not remember the information correctly. Programs that implement chlorine interventions assess use through chlorine residual using a free chlorine sensor at the same time as surveys instead of only relying on self-reporting While this is a more objective measure it yields only infrequent data points and reporting bias often still exists with users chlorinating when they find out a surveyor is visiting. This technology has been able to provide important information on household and community use of these kinds of environmental health technologies in a manner that may be more accurate than surveys and observations
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