Can we expect a better photo capture experience with CHT version 4, in an environment where users use different smartphone models?
Can you explain a bit more about what you mean by “photo capture experience”? Are you referring to workflows where users capture photos in the context of filling out a form and the photo is stored as an attachment to the report?
In general, that functionality should be largely the same, but better. We have made several upgrades to the underlying Enketo library for managing the forms since 3.x that should aid with the smoothness and stability of things.
What kinds of things do you have in mind that important to improve?
In the past, with CHT Server version 3.15, we have tried to capture photos with an app form.
Users are required to take a photo of a handwritten form that has some signatures on it.
We abandoned the project because the CHT Android app crashed when taking photos. This happened with some devices, but not others, and even with some devices, sometimes the app would crash when taking the photo, but sometimes it wouldn’t.
Without knowing the exact cause of the errors you were experiencing, I cannot guarantee that they are fixed in 4.x. I can say that I do not recall hearing about any other projects that have experienced issues with capturing photos from a form. This is a workflow that is supported and any issues we can identify on a recent version of 4.x are bugs that need to be addressed.
At the same time, capturing photos is often not optimal for offline users (even when everything works without errors) because the image files represent a lot of data that must then be synced. On poor network connections, this can significantly increase syncing times. In the past we have encouraged folks to capture the photo data (e.g. the data from the handwritten form) as questions in an actual CHT form. In some situations it is sufficient to capture an acknowledgement indication as one of the form questions. In other cases, the person’s signature is recorded via the signature widget. The signature widget does produce an image attachment file for the signature, but it will be much smaller than an image from the camera.
Thank you for your answers and your time
What I know is that the problem was not related to poor connections, with the same connection some devices were able to sync the photos without fail but others were not
With the same devices and using kobocollect the kobo mobile app, we have never had such problems
In our use case, dedicated supervision with ASA MALI, CHWs do not have mobile devices, but instead fill out a paper form with aggregated data for the month and the paper form is signed by the health center director.
The supervisor visits the CHW at their site and fills out the CHT form with the information from the paper form.
The program managers wanted the supervisor to take a photo of the director’s signature because this information is used to approve or reject the monthly payment to the CHW