PEARL | University of Sydney
Developing PEARL Pal, a mobile app for on-device interoperability to help diagnose TB in Kiribati
Project team
Creating a solution to a real-world problem
The PEARL Study (run by the University of Sydney and the Ministry of Health Kiribati) is part of the World Health Organisation’s ‘End TB Strategy’. Focusing on the Republic of Kiribati, PEARL aims to systemically test the population of South Tawara for active and latent TB, and leprosy. Following initial diagnostic tests, participants will be offered preventive or active treatment, as appropriate. Through a concerted island wide test and treat programme, this intervention aims to eradicate TB and leprosy from the island population.
The Android application, PEARL Pal, was developed to provide on-device interoperability, specifically to meet the requirements of the PEARL Study in South Tarawa.
| Deliverables | Mobile App |
| Platform | Android |
| Tech Stack | React Native, REDCap, Simprints |
| Sector | Medical & Health |
Improving patient care in LMICs
Blue Frontier and The Software for Health Foundation, (part of the AoS Health initiative), have worked in collaboration with the University of Sydney and Simprints to develop ‘PEARL Pal’ which runs on Android tablets, to enable ‘on device’ transfer of information between Simprints, REDCap and the REDCap API. Connectivity and mobile data access is an additional challenge in the Pacific regions, and South Tarawa is no exception.
To address this, PEARL Pal works in an offline mode and will synchronise data with REDCap during daily synchronization events. This will transfer new information gathered that day to the REDCap database and pull-down participant records to PEARL Pal to enable future participant identification.
The development of this application was based on the requirements provided by the PEARL team from the University of Sydney and involved direct communication with members of the Simprints company to ensure that the companion app was able to pull the correct information, a unique patient identifier based on facial coordinates, from the Simprints app and into the correct REDCap field, via PEARL Pal.
Technological innovation to improve patient care at scale
The innovative approach has never been used with a Pacific Island community before so as well as the PEARL Study working to eliminate TB and leprosy, it is also acting as a pilot study for a new way to identify patients and linking health records to individuals.
Blue Frontier and The Software for Health Foundation’s on device interoperability application PEARL Pal sits at the heart of this innovative data journey, linking existing and pre-selected digital tools together, to create a robust and workable on-island data management service.
The next steps for PEARL Pal are to establish a more generalisable and distributable version which can be configured for a wide variety of scenarios including the configuration of data collection fields, and to make the app widely available, in order to establish it as a global public good. There is a huge amount of potential for this application, as it allows for information to be transferred between previously incompatible applications. Although initially developed as a prototype application for this specific project, the PEARL project will provide a way to further gather requirements to make the application more distributable when development continues.