Technical Approaches for paper-based data collection

March 2, 2015 10:54 AM

I'm looking for suggestions on how to gather data using paper-forms which can then be digitized, to compliment a web-based surveying system.

A friend of mine works in a humanitarian organization and they are starting to use tablets/phones to gather monitoring data. In some cases, it's not possible to gather data using a digital device, so the organization has been exploring the feasibility of generating pdfs, printing out pdfs and then scanning them. The surveying system that the organization is starting to use is the Open Data Kit: https://opendatakit.org. The data is mostly numeric.

Are there any services, or open-source solutions that facilitate this type of work?

I've come across a few examples of this in several different applications, but am unsure if these are the state of the art

Map-based data gathering: http://stamen.com/projects/walkingpapers
PDF generation of forms for scanning: http://sdaps.org/
Phone based bubble 'charts': http://serverge.com/use-your-iphoneipad-as-a-bubble-test-scannergrader/

I'm very interested in any type of technical solution that achieves this (and welcome suggestions about key terms or phrases I should use when searching for further info)

posted by a womble is an active kind of sloth to Computers & Internet