Extended Abstract: Building Mobile Application Frameworks for Disconnected Data Management

Abstract

In resource-constrained environments, organizations helping disadvantaged communities often rely on mobile devices as their field worker's primary computing device. While over two-thirds of the world's population have mobile phones, less than half the world's population is connected to the Internet [14]. Thus, many existing mobile frameworks that rely on Internet connectivity are not well suited to long periods of disconnected data collection and management. Furthermore, many existing frameworks are generally aimed at developers or users with significant technical skills and/or financial resources, making it difficult for organizations in resource-constrained communities to adapt mobile frameworks to their highly context dependent field deployments. My research focuses on creating tools that adapt mobile technologies to meet the needs of under-served populations by creating a modular, service-based mobile application framework suited to disconnected data management. The aim is to enable organizations to create domain-independent mobile applications by leveraging customizable frameworks designed to adapt to extreme mobile networking conditions. Designing flexible tools that are configurable by global development organizations necessitates new abstractions that are usable by non-programmers with limited technical expertise. These abstractions should be based on open standards to enable interoperability with other tools to establish an ecosystem of modules that can be used together or independently to create custom information management solutions.