Comparison of Accuracy Between Smartphone-GPS and Professional-GPS for Mapping Tuberculosis Patients in Bandung City (A Preliminary Study)

Medical geography has been long introduced but recently gained its popularity back with the development of global positioning system (GPS). With smartphone being widely used in our society nowadays, manufacturers start to incorporate GPS into devices such as smartphones, so that everybody can utilize GPS, including health care cadres. The present study finds that not all smartphones performed the same accuracy when being used to record TB patients' location in Bandung. Although our results indicate that there are a couple of important factors that need to be considered before using smartphones to obtain geolocation data, we still believe that smartphone-GPS have the potential to be the cheaper alternative to conduct medical geography research.