Use of mobile technology by community outreach workers for HIV and substance abuse prevention

The TLC program's goal is to provide members of the minority re-entry population in West Baltimore with a secure and supportive environment, from which they can assess their work skills, find immediate short-term employment within the community and then provide leadership to peers looking for the same. The TLC program hired ex-offenders as outreach workers to support the survey and reporting requirements for the program. There are a variety of surveys that need to be administered to program participants depending on the services provided. Thus the outreach workers may be providing a survey in preparation for HIV testing on the streets and then interview a potential participant for the worker training program or administer an intake form for the transitional housing program or survey a member of the community with regard to their thoughts on the inherent risks of living in the surrounding environment. The use of mobile technology offered both challenges and opportunities to the program and the staff as they sought to meet their data collection requirements. While the adaptation of this technology made it easier for outreach workers to collect and analyze real-time location-based data; it was also easier to collect potentially identifiable data that can pose risks to both the surveyor and the participant. While it was easy to use the technology for data collection and survey administration it was also difficult for the outreach worker to comprehend the underlying data processing that took place - from data collection to submission for centralized storage to the data query process which applied selected filtering and visualization - which led to some initial concern by the user regarding the reliability of the approach. This review considers the pros and cons of applying mobile technology to data collection and survey administration in an urban environment of concentrated disadvantage.