Project Summary Averting future global pandemics requires surveillance programs that can quickly and accurately identify potential new outbreaks worldwide. Mobile health technologies (mHealth) are a promising strategy for collecting data on infectious diseases in remote, underserved settings at the nexus of human and wildlife interactions and zoonotic disease spillover. As the use of mHealth technologies has grown in high income countries, they have also been increasingly investigated in low- and middle-income countries, including Uganda. While potentially promising, these interventions are not one size fits all but instead dependent on a complex interplay between the technology itself and local ethical, cultural, and other norms. Core mHealth technologies such as mobile data collection, cloud storage, and geolocation may be entirely novel for some populations. Differences in understanding of these newly introduced mHealth technologies may pose significant ethical concerns around respect, consent, confidentiality, and beneficence, especially in cultures within Sub Saharan Africa that value a more collectivist social identity. This project will expand research conducted by the parent award which is developing a community-based human and wildlife disease surveillance and outbreak detection system in Southwestern Uganda to investigate bioethical considerations associated with implementation of this platform. Importantly, we will identify key differences in understanding of mHealth concepts between a predominantly oral tradition society as well as a society that places different value on communal vs. individual benefits compared with western societies. Using focus groups, including pertinent subgroups (i.e., community members and leaders, local alternative medicine leaders, park rangers, and poachers) and key representatives from various linguistic, ethnic, and other stakeholder groups, we will develop a locally relevant research ethics framework, including the fundamental concepts of respect, consent, confidentiality, and beneficence. Our study team will then develop novel or select existing, culturally relevant engagement procedures (i.e. familial, community, multimedia, and/or step-wise procedures) which, along with results from the focus groups, will undergo member checking to evaluate accuracy and acceptability. Through a series of bioethics workshops incorporating local western-trained and alternative medicine leaders along with international bioethicists, we will review key outcomes learned through focus group discussions and design a guiding framework for ethically informed implementation of mHealth systems in the Ugandan context. Combined, these products will help local and international partners achieve ethical, sustained, and effective mHealth surveillance systems in similar settings.