Exploiting the short message service as a control channel in challenged network environments
Proceedings of the third ACM workshop on Challenged networks
ICTD'09 Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Information and communication technologies and development
Characterizing the transport behaviour of the short message service
Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Mobile systems, applications, and services
FoneAstra: making mobile phones smarter
Proceedings of the 4th ACM Workshop on Networked Systems for Developing Regions
Analyzing and accelerating web access in a school in peri-urban India
Proceedings of the 20th international conference companion on World wide web
ODK tables: data organization and information services on a smartphone
NSDR '11 Proceedings of the 5th ACM workshop on Networked systems for developing regions
Open data kit 2.0: expanding and refining information services for developing regions
Proceedings of the 14th Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications
A SMS-based application store for emerging market: a case study
SIGGRAPH Asia 2013 Symposium on Mobile Graphics and Interactive Applications
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A significant fraction of mobile users in the rural developing world use low-end mobile devices and have restricted data connectivity services due to a variety of economic factors. These devices have restricted capabilities with voice and SMS remaining the primary communication channels. The penetration of mobile information services in rural areas has largely been limited especially since all applications are operator controlled and very few applications have been adopted on a large scale. This paper presents the design and implementation of UjU, a mobile platform that enables users to develop new SMS-based mobile applications on top of a common platform. Given that the SMS channel is extremely constrained to 140 byte messages, UjU is designed to support database-centric applications that express and operate upon information in structured formats. In UjU, specifying a new application is equivalent to configuring an XML schema. Apart from exporting a standard set of operations, UjU allows the developer to specify new application-specific operations as XML forms. To make efficient use of the SMS channel, UjU supports a semantic compression engine that leverages the structured nature of the information transmitted. UjU includes a simple reliability layer to cope with message losses and uses a user-centric consistency model to handle data inconsistencies. We have configured and tested UjU for several SMS-based applications and describe our experiences in tailoring UjU to develop five real-world applications in the areas of mobile microfinance and mobile healthcare; four of them have been deployed in Ghana and Mexico.