Nowadays, most psychological studies are performed based on specifically tailored and validated „pen & paper“ questionnaires. Usually, such a paper-based approach results in a massive workload of the actors involved when collecting data as well as aggregating, analyzing and evaluating it afterwards.

To relieve psychologists from such manual processing of questionnaires and to improve the efficiency of data collection processes, we developed smart mobile applications for a number of validated psychological questionnaires (e.g., KINDEX, PDS, and CAPS). Taking the lessons learned from the development of these applications into account, this project aims at a process-driven approach for defining, validating, deploying, processing, and analyzing questionnaires based on generic tools. Besides, from the aforementioned projects, fundamental requirements with respect to mobile digital data collection can be elicited.

According to our mental model, questionnaires are defined in terms of process models. In turn, the execution of this questionnaire models will be driven by a flexible process engine. Particularly, we aim at an easy-to-use and self-explaining framework for creating, validating, deploying, running, analyzing, and evolving the questionnaires of psychological studies based on smart mobile devices; i.e., QuestionSys will support the entire lifecycle of a mobile and digital questionnaire (cf. Figure 1). Thereby, the provided tools are intended for end-users having no programming background or skills.

Our generic questionnaire framework QuestionSys will encompass the following three parts:

• a questionnaire configurator for defining questions as well as for aggregating them to pages within the questionnaire. The latter will then be displayed on the smart mobile device.
• a questionnaire application enabling the use of smart mobile devices to gather data,
• a middleware for secure data exchange and data management (including cloud-based services)

The main contributions of the QuestionSys project will be to:

• elaborate the requirements for questionnaire applications running on smart mobile devices
• provide a mental model and basic methodology for mapping a questionnaire onto a process model
• present a way for integrating sensor devices (e.g., pulse sensors) with process-driven questionnaires
• derive concepts of a mobile process engine, which is able to execute questionnaire models

Besides the already mentioned issues, QuestionSys addresses several other problems and aims to provide suitable solutions.

• How to efficiently store process-driven questionnaire instances on a smart mobile device?
• How to accomplish this in a robust manner?
• How to utilize concepts known from BPM (e.g., configurable process models, ad-hoc changes, and schema evolution) to enable a flexible processing and evolution of QuestionSys?
• How to provide an editor for a process-centric modelling of questionnaires, that can be used by domain experts?