Unlike a barcode, the RFID tag can be scanned from either side. I do not know of any phone that has the barcode reader built in, I believe there are external readers that might connect to high end phones or PDA's however my experience has been that phones read barcodes through the camera and decode the information. If the quality of the printed barcode has deteriorated or is damaged, then that can cause issues and mothers do not have that kind of time to deal with glitches when they bring their child for checkup and/or treatment.

The timeline from when I joined IRD to when this project was supposed to be deployed was the biggest challenge. So it required crazy work hours for a few months at a stretch to get it all working but I am glad that in the end everything came together and now we have a fully functional system that is being used in the field. Since we are a very small organization, I had to wear a lot of hats while developing the software in the sense that I had to handle many different aspects of design and development which would be handled by different teams of developers in a bigger team.

I had no prior mobile development experience and limited web development experience. The majority of my experience was with desktop based systems and proprietary embedded systems from my previous job. I was primarily working with C, C++ and assembly when I decided to quit my job in the US and come back. It was then that I decided to reinvent myself and focus on java based technologies. I had done java a long time ago so first I had to recap and then learn advanced technologies and frameworks such as Spring, which I used in the development. I also had no prior experience in multi-threading which I had to use for the mobile software.

The server side software also provided certain challenges especially when developing the web front end since that was a bit out of my domain but now I am comfortable with that as well. The positive was that I did not have to start completely from scratch. The NextLab at MIT, who we work extensively with, had developed the basic mobile prototype of this system. I took their work and enhanced it for our study and added the database, server component as well as extensive additions and changes in the mobile application.

It was great working with the MIT team and I will like to thank Luis Sarmenta and Adam Marcus for their effort and help.