A novel cell phone based application for tracking the vaccination coverage in rural communities

Millions of children born worldwide do not receive proper vaccination. Driven by the concern for the lives of such children, institutions and organizations around the world have emphasized the need to strengthen vaccination surveillance and monitoring in developing countries to prevent the spread of vaccine-preventable diseases. In this regard, we present a cell phone based application called Jeev to track the vaccination coverage of children in rural communities. Jeev synergistically combines the power of smartphones and the ubiquity of cellular infrastructure, Quick Response (QR) codes, and national identification cards. In this work we present the design of Jeev and highlight its unique features along with an extended evaluation of its performance. We plan to continue our investigation by pilot testing Jeev in a rural population to study its effectiveness and identify socio-cultural issues that may arise in a large-scale deployment.