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Abstract layered wave bands representing the Oona initiative

Initiative

Oona

Oona is a research technology platform for women’s health, community health and global health research.

The challenge

Most research software solves one part of the workflow — surveys here, datasets there, transcription somewhere else. Research teams assemble the rest by hand, and the connective tissue is people. It is hardest in exactly the settings the research serves: intermittent connectivity, multiple languages, sensitive health information, distributed field teams and long follow-up.

That overhead falls heaviest on community-based women’s health research, which carries large questions on thin resources. Oona exists to take that weight off the people doing the work — to accelerate community-based research and to foreground women’s and community health as a research domain in its own right, with the intersectional and global perspectives it requires.

From the platform

All data shown is sample data.

The Oona study command center, showing enrolment, retention and open data-quality flags alongside patterns worth investigating
Study Command Center — a study’s state answered at a glance, with intelligence on the front page rather than in a separate tab.
An Oona investigation showing an analysis trace, an investigation brief and a provenance panel side by side
Investigate — every step inspectable and re-runnable, every claim labelled by evidence type and traced to its source.
Oona Listen, showing qualitative transcripts in parallel languages with coding and themes
Listen — qualitative evidence in parallel languages, with human-validated coding.
Oona Collect and Field, showing field team status and synchronisation state
Collect & Field — the four questions a field researcher always has, and synchronisation you can audit.
A participant record shown as a timeline across four channels with consent, referrals and an audit trail
Participant Journey — a participant as a timeline across channels, with consent, referrals and an audit trail on one record.

What we’re building

Oona is organised as one research lifecycle — design, collect, connect, understand, act — rather than a set of separate tools bolted together. The capabilities below are the suite that lifecycle is built from.

  • Study

    Research design and study management: protocols, sites, eligibility, instruments, consent workflows and multilingual, versioned data dictionaries.

  • Collect

    Mobile-first, offline-first collection in the field, including lightweight WhatsApp workflows so community health workers need not open the full application.

  • Listen

    Qualitative data treated as first-class research data: parallel languages, redaction, human-validated coding, and themes that trace back to a timestamp.

  • Cohort

    Longitudinal participant management across visits, households and follow-up windows.

  • Field

    Operational tools for field research — team coordination, device state and synchronisation a supervisor can audit.

  • Network

    The multi-institution partnerships research actually runs through, modelled rather than left implicit.

  • Rules

    A configurable research workflow and rules engine for referrals, escalations and protocol logic.

  • Connect

    Coexistence with the health and research infrastructure already in place, rather than an assumption that Oona replaces it.

  • Intelligence

    Agentic analysis bound by a contract: trace, model comparison, triangulation, contradictory evidence, limitations, provenance, and a human decision at the end.

  • Insights

    How a finding is communicated once it holds — to a team, a partner or a community.

  • Library

    A searchable knowledge environment for women’s and community health research.

  • Community

    Research that supports action and learning inside the communities it draws on.

  • Vault

    The governance and trust layer underneath the ecosystem.

Intended audience

Research teams working in women’s health, community health and global health, including implementation research, longitudinal population research, mixed-methods research, and field research in low-connectivity environments.

The people who carry that work day to day: field researchers, community health workers, and the multi-institution partnerships that run studies across sites.

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