MOBILE BASED SURVEY

MOBILE BASED SURVEY

As soon as you hear word survey ,what is the first thing that strikes in your mind? Well a survey is a data collection tool used to gather information about individuals. A survey may focus on factual information about individuals, or it might aim to collect the opinions of the survey takers. There are various ways to conduct survey, the prominent one being:

• Questionnaire
• Emails
• Online Surveys
• In Person
• SMS

     There are various utilities that are available on internet to assist you on this topic:

• http://www.openxdata.org 
• http://www.frontlinesms.com 
• http://www.datadyne.org/episurveyor 
• http://opendatakit.org 
• http://acquee.com 
• http:/questionpro.com

The project was implemented two different techniques:

• Using cell phone and communication centre
• Using free application such as Episurveyor

Graphical Interface Of Nokia PC Suite

To execute using basic cell phone you need to set a sms gateway to receive and send message or even you can use frontline-sms v1.6.16.3 for collecting data and making up database to analyze and the statistics to be used by researchers across the globe.

An alternate way to this approach is use to any cell phone and use any pc suite or communication centre. In implementing project I used Nokia Communication centre and Nokia5235-560v5. After receiving enormous response database was created in.csv(common value separated )format using communication centre and exporting it. The data was statistically interpreted it using graphs and pie charts in MS Excel and various free online graphing utilities.

Survey using an online utility Episurveyour (www.episurveyor.org) to collect data from the user using two different techniques .The first one being using the episurveyor application to collect the data from user and second being getting survey done through sms . Episurveyor is a secure mobile data solution that let you analyze the data in real time.

To proceed in the survey we created an account on the application server .A survey form was created in the account giving all the necessary details to the user from question to multiple choice answers. Each survey form corresponds to unique form id which is used to reference the particular survey when user opts for the option of uploading data through sms service .As soon as the form comprising of multiple or single question(s) is prepared now you are ready to perform the survey. The two processes used to collect data from multiple user are :

a) SMS Upload using the Episurveyor app on phone: The episurveyor app was installed on the gprs enabled phone. Through this app it was possible to connect the client on phone and server on the computer. The app provides user various options from getting new survey forms from both my own as well as other user’s record ,send data to server as well as memory card, show statistics and even get updates.Thus to perform the survey different users were asked to install the application on their phone and download the survey form from the server and perform the required survey using the app and then upload back the data on the main server to compile the data. 

 

  

   

b) SMS DATA ENTRY using the standard Sms function of using any mobile phone: This method works on the cheapest to expensive phone that to just at no additional cost apart from that of cost of sms.Corresponding each survey form there was a unique form id to identify the particular survey and options were encrypted in the each questions so user can easily upload the data just mentioning the options. To create the mobile server we used the sms gateway using the application,save the gateway number in the application to make the process feasible.After setting the gateway user was asked to send the response in the prescribed format :


formIDnumber#firstanswer#secondanswer#thirdanswer

Thus after collecting the survey data from the user it was analyze using the graph and statistical tools and thus survey result was compiled to use the analysis for future reference and use of others.




CONTRIBUTED BY.....
                ---ANKUR DOHARE
                ---KSHITIJ JAIN