OMEVAC - Open Mobile Electronic Vaccine Trials

The objective of OMEVAC (Open Mobile Electronic Vaccine Trials) is to develop a complete secure, mobile and electronic system for data collection and management in vaccine trials, from source to publication; using and complying with international standards and requirements. It will be field tested in Africa and Asia in ongoing trials and be available at no cost including all developed source codes and documents.

OMEVAC is thus not a traditional vaccine R&D project, but a project aiming at reducing the resource requirements of doing a vaccine trial in a mid-low-income/resource setting.

This project will enable research institutions in low-income countries to conduct high quality vaccine trials. To solve the challenges of the paper based process, we are replacing it with a completely digitalized mobile system for conducting clinical trials. Researcher and field workers will use handheld computers and directly enter the collected information. This will drastically reduce the logistical challenges related to paper handling and digitalization.

We are building upon existing software solutions like: 1) openXdata (earlier named EpiHandy ), a generic electronic open source and free mobile and web based data collection and management system, that is being used for regular studies in low-income countries, 2) R, a widely used and renowned open source statistical analysis tool and 3) OpenClinica, a web-based free and open source clinical trial system. This will form a complete and integrated electronic data chain from point of collection through to sharing and publishing of data.

The OMEVAC project is close to midway in the 4 year project period and we have made considerable progress towards the aims and objectives of the project. The project has been presented at a number of meetings and conferences.

A new and revised version of openXdata (earlier EpiHandy ) has been made that will run on most platforms available and allow collected/stored data to be accessible through a standard web-browser with high level of security. openXdata further has improved the mobile versions and can run on a very wide variety of mobile devices including mobile phones costing less than 50 USD.

The integration between openXdata and OpenClinica and R (for statistics) is moving forward and early versions have already been demonstrated.

OMEVAC is a 4 year research project generously funded by the Research Council of Norway under the GLOBVAC program.

The formal partners of OMEVAC are:

• Cell-Life, http://www.cell-life.org/
• Handheld Solutions & Research Labs - HANDSREL, India, http://www.handsrel.com/
• INDEPTH Network, Ghana, http://www.indepth-network.org/
• IRD - Interactive Research and Development, Pakistan, https://www.irdresearch.org/
• Makerere University, Uganda
  • Faculty of Computing and IT (CIT), http://www.cit.ug/
  • Medical Faculty
• MCTA - Malaria Clinical Trial Alliance, http://www.indepth-network.org/
• Promise Consortium, http://www.promiseresearch.org/
• TDR/WHO - Special Programme for Research and Training in Tropical Diseases, www.who.int/tdr
• University of Bergen
  • Centre for International Health, http://www.cih.uib.no/
  • InfoMedia , (Department of Information Science and Media Studies), http://www.infomedia.uib.no/
  • Department of Informatics, http://www.uib.no/ii/en
• University of Maine, Department of computing, USA, http://www.usm.maine.edu/