JavaRosa is an open-source platform for data collection on mobile devices. At its core, JavaRosa is based on the XForms standard -- the official W3C standard for next-generation data collection and interchange.

The Problem

A variety of tools are urgently needed to address the lack of data in low-income countries required for decision making and research at all levels of the health and other sectors. Due to recent technological advancements, there is great excitement for using mobile phones to address current gaps in information. Phones and PDAs have proven to be dramatically faster and more complete than traditional methods of pen and paper, and can be more accurate and less expensive as well.

What is Java Rosa

JavaRosa is an open-source platform for data collection on mobile devices. It is a project of Open Rosa, a member of the Open Mobile Consortium.

JavaROSA has been designed for a wide and ever increasing variety of applications including taking survey data, following disease management, guiding health workers through treatment protocols at point of care, and collection of longitudinal medical records. JavaROSA's framework architecture is flexible and modular, allowing the development of wholly new applications with minimal new code.

At its core, JavaRosa is based on the XForms standard -- the official W3C standard for next-generation data collection and interchange. JavaRosa is written in Java Mobile Edition (J2ME), and supports a wide array of devices, from top-end smart phones and PDAs with large screens and abundant memory, to low-end devices like the Nokia 6085 and 2630. Making JavaRosa usable on low-resource devices is one of the project's highest priorities.

Java Rosa is being used currently in projects like GATHER, run by AED/Satellife in Uganda, and in CommCare, a project that is using and expanding JavaRosa to support community health workers with their data collection tasks during home visits with patients.

More Information

There is an online demo of JavaROSA available (dev.dimagi.com/javarosa/livedemo/). We are close to consolidating all the necessary functionality required for a version 1.0 release. We get frequent requests for uses of JavaROSA though currently an organization must have or hire technical expertise to use JavaROSA. We are working towards a complete solution to allow organizations with minimal technical capacity to quickly author, deploy, and analyze data collected using mobile phones.