Here are some of the questions that we have been asked about the development of a low-cost water test. Some of the questions we have been asked about using cell phones to collect water test results are quite technical, so we have put these in a separate section.

1. How will the next phase of development be funded?

For details of the next phase of this research programme, please visit the Aquatest2 project web site.

2. What happens if you give a low-cost water test to communities who are getting their drinking water from a river (perhaps alongside an intermittent piped supply, say)?

This is an interesting question and at this early stage, it is difficult to anticipate what will happen. However, one positive outcome would be if people tested water at different points along the river. A community might then be able to identify if there were certain bits of the river (e.g. upstream of a cattle crossing / sanitation facilities) that were safer for extracting water than elsewhere. Communities may also resort to household-level water treatment, such as simple ceramic filters, to improve their drinking water quality. However, we will not know how communities will behave until field trials of a prototype test begin.

3. Will a water test actually be of any use, given that many people in developing countries do not consider diarrhoea to be a serious health problem?

This is a difficult question to answer and similar difficulties have been encountered in marketing home water treatment, for example. This problem could potentially stop a low cost water test being effective in certain cultures, if it were used by the communities / households themselves. However, at least some potential users – for example, NGO's, government environmental health officers, and international agencies - are well aware of the dangers of low quality water and would act on it. Furthermore, there are many cultures where people are well aware of the dangers of unsafe water and diarrhoea.

4. How will training be provided to the people who will use an AQUATEST?

We envisage that the test itself will be distributed with simple instructions, explaining how to use it – preferably with plenty of graphical illustrations. In this way, we hope that if the test is distributed without any associated training, end-users will have the basic information required to use it. However, we would recommend more generally that some form of training is provided when the tests are distributed, over and above any information that is provided as part of the test kit.

5. Are there any plans for certification to ensure that any new test produced by the AQUATEST PREPARATORY PROJECT consortium actually works?

There is no international certification agency for water quality diagnostics, however, it is essential to determine how well any new test that we develop compares to existing products for measuring microbial contamination of water. We will utilize both laboratory and environmental water samples to make these comparisons, and we will not release a new diagnostic test until this comparative analysis demonstrates that our new test works as well as or better than existing tests for detecting specified levels of microbial contamination. Results of our product comparisons will be readily available on the AQUATEST website.

5. How long will it take to develop a new test?

We are currently conducting two specific activities that will influence the final design of the test: 1) a needs assessment that will determine the requirements of developing countries and disaster response agencies for microbiological testing of drinking water; and 2) a technology analysis that will determine how current water tests as well as recent advances in microbial diagnostics will be incorporated into our test specifications. We will not have an accurate time frame for the development of the new test until these two activities are completed. Nevertheless, we estimate that an initial water testing system utilizing microbial culture based assays will be available in the next 2-4 years. We will also develop a “next-generation” test that incorporates molecular detection techniques. Our target for this next-generation test is within 3-5 years.

Questions about using cell phones to collect water quality data

A. How will the cell phone based system work in places like South Africa where there's more than one network provider?

As the system should operate on any providers's network, the choice of network provider should be determined by which has the best coverage in a particular area. The way this has worked with the Cell-Life Project (see the description of partners on our web site) is that all the major cell phone companies have to agree to invest a certain amount of money in socially responsible projects in order to get their licences from the South African government (an offset agreement). Cell-Life is one such socially responsible project for companies like Vodacom, and they can even ask the company to set up one or two extra masts within their study area through the offset agreement, so as to improve the cell phone coverage.

B. How will the cell phone based system work in places like South Africa where there's more than one cellular operator? (for example, Vodacom, MTN and Cell C in South Africa)?

The short answer is that this is something that has been an issue with previous use of cell phone technology in rural information systems, but should not be a problem in the future.

In the past, Cell-Life used Wireless Internet Gateway (WIG) / Short Message Service (SMS) technology to develop a patient Aftercare tool in 2002. This application was limited in the amount of data it could collect by the allowable size of the WIG menu, which was stored on the sim card. In addition, users could not download the software directly to their phone – it had to be ‘pushed’ to the SIM card by the network operator. This meant there was a reliance on a particular network operator.

To avoid this, software for collecting water quality data will be written in Java, a platform-independent programming language. This means it should run on any Java-enabled mobile phone regardless of which network the phone is used on. In addition, it will be able to be downloaded onto the phone by the user (usually over gprs).

There are two possible data transmission methods: SMS and GPRS (Global Packet Radio Service). Both are GSM network standards, which means that data transmission works identically on any GSM network. GSM is the most widely-used mobile network standard – to get an idea of which networks support GPRS or SMS, visit www.gsmworld.com.

This new method for collecting data using cell phones should therefore work on any network, and reliance on the network operator is eliminated.

C. What if the user sends the data to the wrong number?

Once the user has collected the data using the customised data collection application on the phone, it is sent to a number (in the case of SMS), or the URL (in the case of data transmision over GPRS). This number or URL is not entered every time the data is sent. It can be hard-coded into the application, or set once when the application is first downloaded.

D. How secure is data transmission over cell phone networks?

As far as security is concerned, this is an area where transmission over GPRS has clear advantages over SMS. With GPRS, the system can make use of a technology known as end-to-end HTTPS encryption – this is the same protocol used to secure online banking transactions. SMS relies on the security of the GSM network during transmission – while GSM networks are considered to be secure, this is under the control of the network operator, and it is possible that a determined intruder could intercept a message. For more information on GSM security, see http://www.hackcanada.com/blackcrawl/cell/gsm/gsm_security.html

E. How can you track a report – how can the sender be sure that the results of a water quality test were received successfully?

We intend that the cell phone-based system will send a message confirming the receipt of water quality test results back to the sender. At the most basic level, this would either be an error report, in case of problems with the message, or a confirmation that the data has been successfully stored. However, this feedback could be made much more useful. For example, if there are problems identified with a source during the sanitary inspection, the system could be designed to reply with information on how to rectify them.

F. Where will the reports sent from a cell phone be stored, and will this system keep all the data so that problems can be tracked?

When reports are received, they will be validated and automatically inserted into a database, which should be housed in a secure location and regularly backed up. On an organisational level, this database could be the responsibility of a government water surveillance agency, or a regional or national head office of a government water ministry. This data would then be made available in various forms to those who need to use it, such as water supply companies, the health authority, and community water management groups. Because it may not be desirable to make all data available to all users, some kind of access control mechanism would also be implemented.

The use of a standardised central database is a major advantage of the cell phone-based system, as it can offer more efficient and reliable data storage, and faster communication of results and recommendations.

G. Will people trust a cell phone-based system, and act on a recommendation they receive on their cell phone after sending in a report? Official stamps and paper reports have great power in convincing people of the authenticity of results and advice.

While Cell-Life's experience has shown some factors that can encourage adoption, this is definitely a concern, and needs to be taken into account.

Communication at the village level may still be best done using community meetings, or with the assistance of a local NGO or faith-based group. In this case, the system could be used to produce familiar paper-based results and recommendations. Part of the work in WP3 is also to define a minimum set of resources needed to implement an IT-based management system (for example, GSM network coverage, and an existing reporting process). This means that the initial focus of the cell-phone data collection system is on existing national or NGO-initiated monitoring programmes rather than on community management of supplies.

Within this context, we hope the following will encourage adoption: 

Identification of a 'champion' within the organisation 
1. A consultative implementation process, focussed on including actual users. 
2. Existing familiarity with the operation of a cell phone. Where cell phone use is widespread, the barriers to entry using this technology are significantly lower than with other IT systems. 
3. Translation of the data collection application into local languages 
4. Feedback to sender, even if the report is valid and has been successfully inserted.