New documentation available re: Muting

Esther_Moturi · February 15, 2023, 9:43am

Hallo, we are happy to announce that high level functional documentation on muting is now available on the documentation site. Muting is a feature that temporarily silences tasks and SMS schedules for a person or a household. This feature is commonly used when a person or household has temporarily relocated or refused services.

A number of projects have already deployed this feature and we hope that this additional documentation would help inform the community how the muting feature functions.

Feel free to suggest any additional information that may be missing.

michael · March 9, 2023, 1:20pm

We would love to learn more about how Muting is being used. What scenarios does your project use the muting functionality for?

iesmail · March 10, 2023, 8:15am

Hi @michael
In the Jamii ni Afya project, it’s typical for a pregnant woman to leave her residence and go to her parents’ home to give birth. When the mother and newborn are ready to return home, the CHV mutes both profiles in the app, indicating that they are returning home after delivery.

Kymoraa · March 10, 2023, 9:56am

Hello @michael
In Living Goods we also have scenarios where a supervisor might temporarily need to mute a CHW area. This might happen if the CHW is not able to attend to the area either due to e.g., a personal emergency, spoilt/lost device etc.

PS. In this scenario, once a CHW is muted, all households (HHDs) that they cover are also muted. But we had an issue reported around this:

Currently when unmuting this CHW, this didn’t cascade to the CHW’s households on the CHW’s end. And they had to manually unmute all these HHDs
How do we separate originally muted households (pre-muting of the CHW). That is; households that the CHW had already muted by themselves. So that if the unmuting cascades, these HHDs still remain muted?

So we have explored workarounds for this. Does CHT natively support this?

jkuester · March 17, 2023, 5:23pm

Currently when unmuting this CHW, this didn’t cascade to the CHW’s households on the CHW’s end. And they had to manually unmute all these HHDs

From CHT 3.2.0, both muting and unmuting should automatically cascade to children contacts in the hierarchy. However, before CHT 3.12.0 the muted contacts would only be displayed as muted in the UI for offline users after they had synced to the server. After 3.12.0, when an offline user mutes a contact, the UI will immediately show the contact as muted (even if the user has not synced yet). (And all of this also applies to the UI changes expected when unmuting a contact.)

How do we separate originally muted households (pre-muting of the CHW). That is; households that the CHW had already muted by themselves. So that if the unmuting cascades, these HHDs still remain muted?

Unfortunately, I do not think this is currently supported by the CHT. I have logged a new issue to track this feature request. Please have a look and feel free to respond with any additional details/clarification/suggestions (either here or directly on the issue).

github.com/medic/cht-core

When unmuting parent do not cascade to contacts that were already muted before the parent

opened 05:13PM - 17 Mar 23 UTC

jkuester

Type: Improvement

**What feature do you want to improve?** Currently when muting/unmuting a paren…t contact (e.g. a household), the muting/unmuting will cascade down to the children of the contact (and so the household members will also be muted). However, consider the scenario where a CHW area contains a household, `H` that contains members: `A` and `B`. - The CHW mutes `A` because they have temporarily left the area - The CHW retires and so the CHW Supervisor mutes the whole CHW Area - The muting cascades down to `H` and `B` (and technically `A`, but it is already muted) - A new CHW is onboarded and so the supervisor unmutes the CHW Area. - The unmute cascades down to `H`, `A`, and `B` The undesirable behavior is that `A` is unmuted because the CHW Area was unmuted when, in fact, `A` has not yet returned to the area and should still be muted. **Describe the improvement you'd like** From a behavior perspective, I think it would be preferable for unmuting to not cascade to contacts that were previously already muted. The only thing that should unmute those contacts would be submitting an unmute form for them specifically. **Additional context** Originally raised in a conversation [on the forum](https://forum.communityhealthtoolkit.org/t/new-documentation-available-re-muting/2476/3).

michael · March 24, 2023, 1:41am

Hi @Kymoraa … can you tell us a little more about why the supervisor mutes the CHW area? I understand that the CHW is not able to attend to their area, but I’m curious the main reasons you need to mute the CHW’s area during this period. Is this more about how the CHW’s tasks get handled, the Supervisor’s tasks, or perhaps other things related to analytics, payments, etc…?