Another successful acquisition of the Institute of Databases and Information Systems (DBIS): the third-party funded project QuestionSys with the Clinical Psychology and Clinical Neuropsychology Group from the University of Constance. In this interdisciplinary research project, we will develop an advanced software technology that enables domain experts to realize mobile and process-centric, electronic questionnaires in the context of clinical and psychological studies.

The QuestionSys project is funded with 200.000 Euro over a period of 2 years. The subsidies are provided by the research program “Research Initiatives, Infrastructures, Network and Transfer Platforms” in the context of the third line of funding of the DFG excellence initiative. Out of this research grant, DBIS will receive the funding of a PhD student over a period of 2 years.

Background
Diagnostics and data collection in psychological research as well as in psychiatric and neurological practices is mostly based on pen and paper, i.e., paper-based questionnaires to be filled out manually by interviewers or subjects (e.g., patients). The collected data then needs to be manually transferred to electronic sheets in order to automatically process and analyze it. However, such a manual transfer comes with a high risk of errors. Further, it leads to significant delays as well as problems regarding data quality assurance. Finally, paper-based data collection and manual data transfer often bind a significant number of resources. For these reasons and taking the technological opportunities of smart mobile devices into account, however, the collection of psychological and clinical data with pen and paper is no longer adequate nowadays.

The overall goal of the QuestionSys project is to enable a flexible and mobile collection of clinical and psychological data. For this purpose, smart mobile devices will be used to display clinical or psychological questionnaires as well as to enable a flexible and quick data entry. To foster this goal, a holistic approach supporting the entire lifecycle of electronic questionnaires will be developed. This includes the definition of valid questionnaires by domain experts, their deployment to mobile devices, their enactment on the mobile devices as well as the analysis and archiving of the data collected. In order to involve domain experts in all these steps as well as to allow for the quick and robust evolution of electronic questionnaires, a rigor, process-centric approach for defining, enacting, analyzing and evolving questionnaires will be provided. In particular, this raises challenging issues related to the definition of questionnaires by domain experts as well as the process-driven enactment of questionnaire instances on mobile devices.

The DBIS team participating in the QuestionSys project includes Prof. Dr. Manfred Reichert, Johannes Schobel, Marc Schickler and Rüdiger Pryss.

Further information about QuestionSys can be found on the project website.