CrowdsourceData

Data collection can be a very complex, expensive and long process. CrowdsourceData is a platform that attempts to close data gaps in low and middle income countries (LMICs) by outsourcing the data collection process in a community to the people. 

Data can be very valuable in many situations including those that are health related and the inability to collect it can have grave consequences. 

For instance LMICs lack the capacity to respond to the current COVID-19 pandemic because their data and statistical resources at a national level are already overstretched. With stretched and limited resources, policymakers face extremely difficult decisions about what groups to first prioritize for vaccine distribution. Delivering COVID-19 vaccines safely, equitably, and rapidly across the world is a way that global health systems can respond to and prevent future health crises.

With CrowdsourceData solution for data collection and data validation these problems could be easily overcome.

Many industry experts and popular business publications, including The Economist, have recently attested that data, not oil, is now the most valuable resource in the world. Industry experts have coined the phrase “data economy” to describe the influence and prominence of big data in today’s society.

When properly refined, usable data quickly becomes a decision-making tool allowing companies or governments quickly react to change in the market or in the population. In the area of Healthcare, data could have helped detect and prevent the spread of many diseases including the current pandemic. 

There is currently too few data collected in low and middle income countries (LMICs) and the causes of that are many with the most significant one, certainly being a lack of financial resource. 

Our solution is to have companies or governments that are willing to collect data in a certain geographic region, create a task on our platform just like a company would create a challenge on Kaggle. An incentive could be added or not. To create a task, the company would need to specify information about the data to be collected by using our platform to create the form for the data collection.

Users of the platform willing to participate in the task will sign up for the task and use the form created by the company to collect the data.

To validate the data that a user collects and make sure it is genuine data, we use a proprietary data validation technique.

Basically our data validation technique will compare different probability distributions of data collected in each area. It will then proceed to validate the data area by area by choosing the most common distribution as the right one.

Two distributions are considered similar if they fall within a predetermined confidence interval but are not exactly similar. 

Users whose datasets have been validated receive a compensation that is proportional to the quantity of data collected and the number of validated datasets.

Our target population is people from low and middle income countries (LMICs). Our solution will help LMICs better track changes in their populations, spot and stop the propagation of very contagious diseases before they become an epidemic like Ebola or a pandemic like COVID-19.

Our solution can also help companies collect data in a more efficient, accessible and cheaper way from LMICs in case they are planning to move their operations or are already operating in those countries.

Low and middle income countries represent the majority of countries in the world and solving data collection for them means solving data collection for most countries in the world. Our solution will equip primary healthcare providers in those countries with the necessary tools and knowledge they need to stop a disease outbreak. It will also help policymakers decide which groups to first vaccinate in case of an outbreak.

This will strengthen disease surveillance and help develop early warning predictive systems. Collecting data more easily can also help prevent the spread of misinformation.

We are currently building and testing our service through small tasks

that we create in our different neighborhoods in Accra, Ghana. 

Our solution uses a data validation technique that allows the process of data collection to be outsourced to users of the app. This allows for a faster and less expensive data collection campaign and will enable low and middle income countries to collect more data about their populations.

This approach to data collection could change the whole industry as it provides a cheaper and faster alternatives to the currently used approaches. 

We measure our progress toward our impact goals by keeping track of the

number of users of the platform as well as the number of data collection
tasks launched on our platform.

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We have a diverse and complementary team of experts in probability,

statistics, computer science and machine learning. We have take part in a
few data collection campaigns ourselves in the past and are well aware
of the data collection process.

Our main diversity target is to have a 50/50 split between our male and female staff.

We are looking for funding an believe that with the help of Solve, we will be introduced to the right network of investors.

Financial resources and mentorship from Solve would be hugely helpful for optimizing our datasets validation techniques.

• Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship
• MIT Bootcamps
• We are open to meet with interested Solve Members that you might recommend.

By democratizing the process of data collection, we allow more data to be collected about people's health and physical well-being. This will enable healthcare practitioners to have the information necessary to do their job and allow for the rapid detection of an epidemic or a pandemic.

We are experimenting with using machine learning to improve on our datasets validation technique. This prize will enable us to put more resources towards developing a datasets validation model that can be more efficient than our current validation technique.

Our data collection technique provides a good way to collect data in order to monitor supply chain services and report the availability or stock-outs of essential medicines and related commodities.