AndWellness: an open mobile system for activity and experience sampling

Reviewer: James H. Bradford

Researchers are beginning to use smartphone technology for data collection in healthcare field research. This paper describes a data collection and analysis system based on this new technology. The design of the system is impressively comprehensive. It encompasses human factors, motivational issues for the research subjects, technological issues associated with adapting smartphone technology for experimental work, battery consumption, and the needs of modern researchers. Complex design is often a matter of making balanced tradeoffs, and the authors of this study made their tradeoffs carefully. The paper fully describes the issues and design decisions derived from them. The basis of this research is a new and integrated software system that collects survey responses and sensor input in real time through mobile phones provided to the subject population. The system includes built-in reminders that can be triggered by an internal clock or by location (the phones had built-in global positioning system (GPS) units). A central server processes the real-time data and summarizes it for the researchers through a dashboard that includes a number of indicators on the responses received by the system. The authors also describe a qualitative study using volunteers from a research laboratory as experimental subjects. Their performance and diligence in self-reporting information through phone-based surveys as well as after-the-fact focus groups suggest that with some tuning, the new system is a promising experimental tool. This paper will be useful for the designers of phone-based data-gathering tools, as well as for the researchers who use such tools. In addition, students in design classes could use this work as a case study in pragmatic design. Online Computing Reviews Service

Reviewer: George Popescu

The Android-based AndWellness mobile application collects passive and active data from users in order to help them find more information about their health-related habits. Systems that rely on personal data collection are useful in daily life since they help individuals monitor their performance. The AndWellness application helps study participants and researchers record events at the moment that they happen rather than questioning participants about their past experiences; this eliminates recall bias. It prompts users to reply to questionnaires on their mobile phones at definite time intervals. The application displays the results in real-time for both the users and the researchers. Campaigns, sensors, and triggers are used to collect data. Privacy is assured through the use of an end-to-end encryption protocol. However, it is always up to the user to check his or her login credentials and keep them safe. The application employs a representational state transfer (REST) architecture, using a MySQL database, TomCat server, and Java Virtual Machine (JVM). The evaluation focuses on technical details, but the user data is the most important since it shows a high degree of participation and usage. All in all, the application is a great contribution to the user behavior monitoring field. Online Computing Reviews Service