In collaboration with psychologists from the University of Constance, DBIS enters new paths and has developed a mobile iPad application for the support of a psychological study in Burundi, Africa.

Funded by the VolkswagenStiftung, the team of scientists around Dr. Roland Weierstall, Anselm Crombach, Corina Nandi, and Prof. Dr. Thomas Elbert from the University of Constance conducts an innovative study relating to trauma deuteropathy of soldiers after military action. The goal of this study is to develop and investigate novel strategies for prevention and therapy for reintegration of soldiers after traumatic events during war. The application of the study comprised the execution of 1000 interviews and 60 preventative interventions with African soldiers and ex-combatants.

Hitherto, data collection in similar studies has been carried out mostly paper-based. This involves the recoding of the results on paper to transfer them manually to computer systems. The scientists then use computer programs (e.g., SPSS) to reveal coherences that can be used to develop and evaluate new therapies. As the transfer of the interview results is very time-consuming and error-prone, IT-supported data collection avoiding the media disruption is desirable. A starting point for creating a chain without such media disruption would be the use of mobile and smart devices.

Due to the framework conditions of this study, mobile technology assistance is difficult to realize: the studies are conducted in Africa outside the cities with hardly any infrastructure and highly sensible data. Thus, it must be guaranteed that in case of data losses, the lost data latter cannot be viewed. Other issues include long periods without power supply or internet connection.

Prof. Elbert’s team and the DBIS institute have already collaborated in other projects involving and investigating the use of mobile technology in psychological studies. Hence, the interdisciplinary experiences that have been acquired so far could be well applied. For this project, the DBIS team around Prof. Dr. Manfred Reichert, Dipl.-Inf. Rüdiger Pryss, and Dipl.-Inf. Martin Liebrecht developed a mobile application to conduct the study completely IT-supported. Challenges in this development included the short development time (1 month), the implementation of the safety measures (e.g., the utilization of encryption algorithms), and the design of the mobile application in a way that it can be used by psychologists on site without much training. One function required in this context was that the scientist from Constance could independently create surveys in foreign languages and transfer them from a local computer to the iPads. This was necessary due to the fact the interviews were conducted partly in English and partly in French. A specially required variant was combining French and Kirundi, as some local interviewers used Kirundi for the interviews, but had to see the French variant in parallel since Kirundi is very poor in words and thus, some questions could eventually not be formulated precisely.

The developed application was finally installed on 16 IPads, which the psychologists used to conduct the study in Africa. During the course of the study only minor adjustments became necessary, of which all could be resolved via Skype meetings. Thus, all 1000 interviews were conducted with iPad support and the manual error-prone transfer of the data could be completely avoided by the psychologists. Their feedback was downright positive. First of all the high stability and immense time savings combined with guaranteed flawless registration of the data was emphasized.

The DBIS institute is delighted by this very successful cooperation! In future work, DBIS will used process management technology to introduce flexible ways of setting up new mobile studies.