Android Accessories with SparkFun's IOIO board

Just got a brand new IOIO for Android (pronounced "yo-yo") from SparkFun electronics. It is an a Android Open Accessory compatible development board, which allows external USB hardware to interact with an Android-powered device in an accessory mode without any special licensing or fees, unlike Apple’s Made For iPod (MFi) program. Pretty cool stuff!

The accessory mode does not require the Android device to support USB Host mode, which most of them don’t really do at this time. The Android Open Accessory Development Kit (ADK) APIs support both Android powered devices that act as a conventional USB host, and non-host Android devices that communicate with USB hosts or Android USB Accessories. Devices that support accessory mode can be filtered using a <uses-feature> element in the application's Android manifest.

In accessory mode the Android phone or tablet acts as the USB Device and the accessory acts as the USB Host. This means that the accessory is the bus master and provides power, which also poses some challenges for those developing accessories (e.g. deal with battery, power management etc).

Back to the IOIO board, it supports wired or Bluetooth communication and enables virtually any Android 1.5+ device to control external circuits using different interfaces, from within Android's applications. Thanks to a 48 I/O pins – Digital Input/Output, PWM, Analog Input, I2C, SPI and UART control – you can hook up the IOIO with a variety of devices, such as sensors, motors, actuators etc.

Here are the pieces of hardware I used:

• An Android HTC Inspire 4G
• IOIO for Android board
• USB cable that is compatible with your Android device
• 5-15V power supply with at least 1A of current.

The steps:

1. You need to power the IOIO board. I bought these suggested parts: PRT-08612 (JST Right Angle Connector), TOL-08734 (adapter Barrel Jack to 2-pin JS), and a power supply TOL-08269 from SparkFun. Then, I soldered the JST connector on the back of the board (see picture below).
   
2. Install Eclipse (the Java developers version is sufficient) and ADT.
3. Complete the Hello World Tutorial of Android. If you are familiar with Android development, you may want to skip this step.
4. Run your first Hello IOIO application; this tutorial will get you up to speed. The app displays a toggle button on the screen, which allows turn on and off an LED on the board.

JST connector soldered on the back of the IOIO board.

Now, you are ready to build the next big thing in the Android accessories’ world.

Here is a video showing a very cool implementation of an object follower robot using IOIO:

Resources:

• IOIO wiki
• IOIO discussion group
• Many more videos of IOIO action, hosted by MIT, can be found here

Everyone's against Plastic Credit Cards: the uphill battle to make payment methods smarter

The first contender: the NFC, or Near Field Communication. It was the new buzzword in the mobile space, with the promise of turning your mobile phone into a wallet. Google, Nokia, RIM, Vodafone, Orange, Visa, and MasterCard are some of the companies pushing for NFC support. 

But as expected, NFC is facing a lot of challenges to become a mainstay technology for brick and mortar payments. The infrastructure is not ready yet and the solutions require an entire new ecosystem and infrastructure investments such as merchants having POS terminals capable of communicating with consumers' NFC-enabled mobile devices (mobile, smart tags, Visa PayWave / MasterCard PayPass contactless smart cards, etc) to carry out purchase transactions.

Another big drawback is the iPhone's lack of support for NFC and that will continue to hurt the adoption of NFC for mobile payments, particularly in the US.

Moving on. The growing and increasingly crowded mobile payment ecosystem also has the cloud-based mobile payment solutions that require only downloadable applications for both consumers and retailers, and may make things much easier. Among them, PayPal’s in-store payment service, Dwolla, Square Card Case, to cite few. Together, they come with innovative business models, undercutting fees that merchants currently pay to accept the traditional networks' cards and offering a vast array of value added services. This way of payment has been gaining a lot of momentum lately, specially with PayPal's Home Depot Pilot. 

The list goes on and includes many other methods of payments available, such as QR code scanning, iOS and Android point-of-sale credit card dongles (Square, Intuit's GoPayment etc), SMS, carrier billing etc.

So, NFC is neither the only one more option for enabling payments at the physical point-of-sale nor the most cost-effective solution out there. So, why card issuers are pushing for this? Well, all are working very hard to capture market share and the last thing they want in this case, is to see retailers moving to software-only Dwolla or PayPal that renders them obsolete. 

Who will get traction?

It may be that the killer app or disruptive technology is still to come. 

LAC ICT/Education Policies and Plans Mashup

While ICT alone cannot solve all pressing problems and complex dimensions of the education systems, there seem to be a general perception that it could play a key role in transforming the education sector. However, for this transformation to happen, national governments need to take a stronger leadership role to develop effective policies and plans to mainstream appropriate ICTs into the teaching/learning process.

View LAC ICT/Education Policies and Plans in a full screen map

This holistic approach in the introduction of technology and innovation as a key driver of 21st century education, moving away from technology-centric models ("Computers-First"), has been acknowledged from numerous studies, including an upcoming publication from the IDB (Development Connections: Unveiling the Impact of New Information Technologies) that emphasizes the need of more investment in teacher training and adequate educational software. And as I pointed out on another post, factors such as total cost of ownership, sustainability models, monitoring and evaluation etc, shouldn't equally be overlooked. Countries cannot expect that learning (or other desired education outcomes) will improve overnight with simply greater access to computers.

So, I have put together a collection of national ICT in education policies and plans in the Latin American and the Caribbean (LAC), by mashing up the data compiled and publicly available in an open database with Google Maps through BatchGeo. This work is based on the GeSCI (Global e-schools and Communities Initiative) publication "ICTs in Education (ICT4E) Policies and Plans worldwide " by Roxana Bassi. The result is an outlook of the current policies and plans on ICT in Education in the region that would help us better understand how LAC countries are trying to use ICTs to enhance the relevancy and quality of education.

Datasource: download the full datasheet LAC ICT/Education Policies and Plans Outlook - licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. See "LAC ICT4E Policies and Plans" worksheet.

Interactive Map: view LAC ICT/Education Policies and Plans in a full screen map.

This inventory is by no means exhaustive; it’s a working in progress and subject to change and/or revision based on information received through comments, hearings etc. If you have any recommendations, or you would like to add/update some information in future version, please post your comments and/or send me an email.

As noted on this post, it is important to mention that "ICT use in education" policies take many forms; some places have formal, official, "National ICT/education policies"; in other places, the operative policy is to be found as a the "ICT" component of an education policy, or conversely in the "education" component of a national ICT (or its equivalent, e.g. ICT4D, IT, e-society, etc.) policy or some related field (like workforce development).

But we will dive deep into this data in the next posts, and I encourage you do the same!

Cross-posted to IDB's ICT for Development blog.

What lessons learned do you have from your #mhealth experiences? #mhs10

Patricia Mechael, PH.D., Earth Institute - Top 10 Lessons learned across the globe in the mobile technology space for health: introduce participatory #mHealth models set benchmarks, create outcomes-based research, collaboration.

1. "Capitalized on what others have done, what others have learned"
2. "Evaluate impact of mobile tech to support behavior change"
3. "Localize mobile solutions around content: need to use user-centric design models and involve end users all along the the prodcut development chain"
4. "Look @ health outcomes in terms of mobile health"
5. "Be realistic"
6. "Invest in local talent"
7. "Collaboration is more fun than competition - in the end we all benefit or suffer from how we collaborate"
8. "Recycle, repurpose - Don't reinvent the wheel""
9. "Public-private partnerships in ecosystem"
10. We must unpack the pathways to mobile mediated behavior change" #mhs10 

http://www.mhealthsummit.org/conference/program/super-session-panel-lessons-learned-across-globe-0

Can you heal me now? Potential (and pitfalls) of mHealth

Americas Quarterly

BY David Aylward, Beatriz Leao, Walter Curioso, and Fabiano Cruz

Original Post: http://www.americasquarterly.org/node/1699

Mobile phone subscriptions have overtaken fixed lines as the preferred method of communication across Latin America and the Caribbean, with penetration rates of almost 90 percent. Some forecasts indicate that subscriptions in the region could grow by 8.2 percent in 2010. According to the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), mobile subscriptions globally will surpass the 5 billion mark by the end of the year—an estimated two-thirds of which are expected to be in low- and middle-income countries.

That puts the mobile industry in a position to play a pivotal role in tackling health care for the underserved. Yet health policy leaders have only just begun to address the opportunities of the wireless information revolution sweeping their countries.
“Even the simplest low-end mobile phone can do so much to improve health care in the developing world,” said Dr. Hamadoun Touré, secretary-general of the ITU during the ITU Telecom World Conference in October, 2009. For example, he added, mobile subscribers could be sent reminder messages about medical appointments or prenatal checkups.

That could make a major difference in a country like Peru with a maternal mortality rate estimated at 185 cases per 100,000 births.1 Worldwide, about 10 million women each year suffer serious complications such as infection or disease following childbirth.

Mobile digital technology can empower both patients and practitioners by providing them with the information they need to make informed decisions about critical health issues ranging from healthy living habits to health care provision and monitoring of diseases. For health care officials, the rapid expansion of wireless networks represents a particularly exciting opportunity to reach those who are currently isolated by distance and lack of communication by using mHealth programs. In this respect, health care is no different from other economic sectors that have gained enormous efficiencies and improved outcomes through the use of modern information and communications technologies (ICT). With their ability to reach much further into developing countries than any other technology, wireless networks today power the collection of health data, support diagnoses and treatment, and advance education and research in even the most remote and resource-poor environments—with the potential to do far more.

MORE: http://www.americasquarterly.org/node/1699

Happy b'day 2 u SMS! May u live long and may u cont delivering on what matters most

The equation is fairly simple, the formula is proven and the outcome is predictable:
Number of SMSs ÷ Mobile Subscribers > Number of Calls ÷ Subscribers

Image via Wikipedia

Originally developed to send control messages to phones to update configuration settings, Short Message Service (SMS) became available when telecommunications providers installed GSM services in the mid-1990s. And, next week on July 23rd 2010, SMS will celebrate its 18th birthday!

SMS is a text-only message delivery system on mobile phone networks. As a compliment to voice calls, text messages travel through the wireless service provider’s network, routed and delivered much like a voice call. The messaging server for SMS or text messaging routes all messages to the appropriate mobile phone or application based on the number in the destination address (source: CTIA).

Nowadays, SMS has gone far beyond people-to-people (aka person-to-person or human-to-human) communication. From an interactions perspective, the communication path can fall into the following categories: person-to-person (P2P), person-to-machine (P2M), application-to-person (A2P) and machine-to-machine (M2M). I will talk more about that in another post.

Reaching the incredible mark of 4.5 Trillion SMS text messages sent in 2009 and 3.6 Billion users (source: Tomi Ahonen, 2010), out of over 5 billion mobile phone connections worldwide mobile phone, is by far the most versatile, ubiquitous, prolific and successful DATA application in history (i.e., worldwide email user base is 1.4 Billion).

North Americans got into SMS through voting on American Idol, with the Obama presidential campaign of 2008, more recently with the mGive's Red Cross text message fundraising campaign (Text HAITI to 90999) that raised over $37 million for Haiti, the Text4Baby project that provides timely and expert health information through SMS text messages to pregnant women and new moms, and the list goes on and on. Today, more than half of Americans are active users of SMS text messaging and being fast learners; the US average has reached 4 SMS text messages sent per day across the total mobile phone subscriber base. This means the USA has caught up with average European SMS text messaging usage levels.

SMS for development:

There are a growing number of projects taking advantage of the widely available SMS technology to provide practical solutions to communities and to deliver social change. Here is a short list:

• ChildCount+: an mHealth platform developed by the Millennium Villages Project aimed at empowering communities to improve child survival and maternal health. ChildCount+ uses SMS text messages to facilitate and coordinate the activities of community based health care providers, usually community health care workers (CHWs).


• Text to Change: interactive SMS quizzes based on Text to Change's existing SMS platform to get employees to answer questions about HIV/AIDS, and to encourage them to get tested for HIV/AIDS. The pilot ran for four weeks in November and December of 2009, and had an overall response rate of 43%.


• Ushahidi: a platform for map and time-based visualizations of text reports that has been used most prominently in crisis mapping. The first instance of Ushahidi tracked the post-election violence in Kenya in 2007, closely followed by an instance covering outbreaks of xenophobic violence in South Africa in early 2008. Following the Haiti earthquake in early 2010.


• Farmer's Friend (Powered by Google SMS): offers farmers an affordable and targeted way to search for agricultural tips through a SMS-based database. Keywords in the query are matched against the database and the farmer receives a reply with a tip related to his or her query terms.


• Jokko Initiative: Mobile Technology Amplifying Social Change: makes it possible to communicate with a network of people by sending a text message. This means that a nurse, literacy leader, representative of a women’s association, or the village imam can communicate with community members about events or other important activities in the village (for example, a vaccination campaign or a literacy group meeting).


• Happy Pill: uses "flashing" - where you call a number and hang up immediately to "ping" someone. HappyPills takes this basic, essentially binary interaction and applies it to help improve adherence rates for prescription regimens. A medical center can send out flashes to their patients, and the patients are reminded to take their pills and would then flash back to signal that they took their medicine.

Feel free to add to this list!

[1990-2008] LAC and OECD’s PCs and Mobile subscriptions through the light of the moving bubbles

I am a big fan of Swedish professor Hans Rosling and his work at the Gapminder Foundation, fighting against what he calls the most chronic disorder reported: DbHd (data base hugging disorder). Prof. Hans is noted for his groundbreaking work with compiling and transforming development data into moving bubble diagrams and flowing curves that make global trends clear. Indeed as he usually says in his talks: Power Pointer presentations look like stuffed animals when you compare them with live interactive graphs and maps.

I recently started playing with Google Motion chart to visualize ICT trends and dynamics over time. There are plenty people mastering this king of graph and creating very interesting visualizations and mash-ups. If you are not familiar with this work, I highly recommend that you have a look at the Google Charts Tools, in particular the motion chart. It's a dynamic chart to explore several indicators over time. The chart is rendered within the browser using Flash.

So, here is the final product.

Overall, the following interactive graph shows LAC countries' performance lagging behind OECD countries regarding Personal Computers (PCs) per 100 inhabitants, while Mobile Telephone Subscriptions really took off in the region and grew from 9.9 to 81.6 from 2000 to 2008, respectively.

Notes: Mexico is included in LAC and not in OECD. Countries are coded as OECD regardless of when they became OECD members (i.e., the Slovak Republic joined the OECD in December 2000, but the country is coded as OECD from 1990-2008).

Sources: Prepared by the IDB's Science and Technology Division based on the data from ITU Statistics online database and World Telecommunication / ICT Indicators Database 2009.

Reference: The Imperative of Innovation: Creating Prosperity in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC)

You can find some more visualizations such as this one, using World Bank's Open Data and on the Gapminder website.

Now, if you are wondering how to extract the data from a Microsoft Excel (tm) spreadsheet and translate it into a Motion Chart, here's a tip: you can use an excellent Python package called xlrd, which works on any platform (including Mac!) and allows you to programmatically make these transformations (too boring and time-consuming to do it by hand). Note that this is a library target to software developer and it is not an end-user tool. I will discuss this in more detail in a future post. The source code looks like this - note that the code snippet is not complete.

import xlrd # Import the package
    
book = xlrd.open_workbook("yourfile.xls") # Open an .xls file

sheet = book.sheet_by_index(0) # Get the first sheet

regs = sheet.nrows

while rowNumber <= MAX_NUM_YEARS:      

 currentYear = str(sheet.cell_value(rowx=rowNumber, colx=2))      
 
 for counter in range(regs):              
  country = sheet.cell_value(rowx=counter, colx=0)         
  year = str(sheet.cell_value(rowx=counter, colx=2))         
  pcs = str(sheet.cell_value(rowx=counter, colx=5))         
  mobiles = str(sheet.cell_value(rowx=counter, colx=6))         
  region = sheet.cell_value(rowx=counter, colx=1)                  

  if (year == currentYear):             
   print "['",country.rstrip(),"'",             
   print ",new Date (",year,             
   print ",0,1)",             
   print ",",pcs,             
   print ",",mobiles,             
   print ",'",region.rstrip(),"'],"          

  elif (year == "NEXT"):             
   rowNumber += 1             
   break                       

Acknowledgement and thanks:
Alison Cathles (Research Fellow at the IDB's Science and Technology Division)