Yes
Then it is time for more mobile apps for research
More and more research environments have come to the realization that the respondents or research
the objects they study, they walk around with a potent "data collection device" in their pocket, purse or backpack
and they like to take their mobile with them everywhere. And for those who do so-called EMA studies
i.e. Ecological Momentary Assessment, this provides completely new opportunities for collecting real-time data
and make repetitive observations from the participants' daily environment.
As is well known, this entails a number of challenges with respect to privacy and GDPR.
The apps that we develop use existing infrastructure at the University of Oslo for the collection and storage of
sensitive data. So the apps are in a way built on top of well-established services such as Nettskjema and Service for Sensitive Data, i.e. TSD
and there is a lot of heavy and solid infrastructure behind it when personally sensitive research data is to be collected via mobile devices.
and as long as the apps are in practical use and collect what we call sharp data via our infrastructure
then we require that the projects have an operational TSD project and ethical approvals from their
appointed data protection ombudsman, such as REK or NSD.
Today you will get an intro to a bunch of app development projects with varying levels of complexity.
The app called Right now, on the right of the screen here, is reasonably simple and was made in record time and on a low budget
while FoodCapture on the left, on the other hand, has ground-breaking new technology. It is more complicated, expensive and time-consuming
There is a lot of customization on this with various dependencies and integrations.
And finally, I would also like to mention a large and important project that will start after the summer, namely the video app
When we develop apps in-house, i.e. here at USIT, we follow a set of modern best practice techniques which are
inspired by design thinking and agile method and scrum. This is a working mode and a mindset that
works very well for development and innovation. In the main, it is all about working
feedback based in small autonomous and dedicated product teams, which can then move quickly in the field
So we like to work in time blocks or sprints of 1 to 2 weeks, depending on how often
feedback that is needed in each individual project. And there is close dialogue with clients
and users along the way and preferably at a fixed time on Fridays, where we review increments in the product together.
One of the success criteria for us has been to reduce so-called Work in Progress to one main project.
This means that a product team only works on one project at a time. The experience is that this is significantly better
results, and development is faster and with higher quality.
The team that makes apps here is reasonably full-stack competent. They have front-end skills
programming, backend and interaction design/UX. So this gang does magical things.
Among other things, they have created Happy Hands, which we are very proud of, which Therese has just shown.
Right now, a mobile app has been developed on behalf of the Research and Development Department, Mental Health
and intoxication at Vestre Viken, with postdoc Wenche Ryberg as our contact person. She needed one
mobile app to research the critical phase after discharge from psychiatric treatment.
This app maps the occurrence of suicidal thoughts and associated phenomena among patients
the first weeks after discharge.
The app is called Just now because it asks about the users' experiences here and now, i.e. in situ.
The experience from projects similar to this is that the respondents' motivation to answer increases when they
knows that someone is watching, and in a way monitors the responses.
In this project, the therapists monitor how the patient is doing from day to day
but here there was also a desire to use new research methods to get closer to the respondent.
For 10 days, participants receive 5 daily questionnaires in the app with questions about how they are feeling
Who they are with, if anything significant has happened that day,
whether they have had suicidal thoughts or related experiences around it.
Users receive randomized notifications on their phone during the day, for a period of 10 days after discharge from treatment,
where they were then asked to answer some short forms.
Involved researchers can then study sets of phenomena in real time from hour to hour and in the context in which they occur.
You could say that an advantage in this project was that we could reuse some code from other apps
among others from My EMA, which has similar functionality.
We agreed with the clients to include some gamification in the app to visualize progress
and users get a petal on a flower after each completion and a complete flower when they finish.
This app was developed in a short time, in a constructive interdisciplinary collaboration. Within 2 weeks with
dedicated team effort, the app was ready for TestFlight
and it is an internal record.
Here we see the petal for delivered response, you have responded to one out of five alerts today.
Then there is FoodCapture. This is a tool to help healthcare professionals to chart diet,
and provide better follow-up and treatment of possibly malnourished patients. So in the app, food intake can be registered and
other nutrition-related symptoms.
The complexity of this is completely on the other side of the scale, so in this solution new ground has been broken
The app team, in collaboration with the developers at TSD, has done something that no one has done before, namely fetch
output data dynamically from TSD for BankID users to a mobile app.
The client for this has been the Department of Basic Medical Sciences, co-faculty at the University of Oslo with Mari Mohn Paulsen
as our contact person for development. This project has required stamina, many intense
work sessions and a good dose of bugfixes. The app itself has two modes, one for patients who
registers on your own iOS or Android phone and one for healthcare workers.
A specialized syntax then calculates the patient's need for energy, protein and fluid, and then compares
intake then with individual needs. The new in health worker mode is
among other things, that nurses can be included directly from the app and register on behalf of
patients who cannot do it themselves.
The healthcare worker logs in with the ID port. Then they get a session against TSD that lasts up to a couple
24 hours before they have to log in again.
The app also has a duty room function where several health workers can use the same iPad.
When the data lands in TSD, it is processed with some smart R-scripts, before it becomes
available as readable reports for healthcare professionals in the TSD publication portal. These reports
contains somewhat more information than what you get in the app, including individually tailored suggestions
for nutrition treatment, and a draft nutrition plan, which can also be inserted into the medical record if needed.
After the summer holidays, we will start developing a new video app that delivers data for secure storage
in TSD via Nettskjema, the time is ripe for that.
We have a good collaboration with NKVTS, which is the national knowledge center on violence and traumatic stress.
Our contact person there is Karina Egeland. NKVTS will part-finance the development and will use this in
In connection with the guidance of new therapists, also filming therapy, they saw a supervisor together
retrospect can assess the interaction between therapist and patient.
The recordings will then be available for playback with standard tools in TSD.
There is a great demand for a simple and user-friendly app to make video recordings with secure storage.
Among other things from those who carry out classroom research and guidance in mental health services.
A premise here is that the video app will be developed as a joint service and operated centrally at USIT. That way it will be
also freely available to anyone who has access to the TSD solution as the Dictaphone is today.
Can also mention a couple of other apps we are working with in the future.
Here you see FatigueACt, it is a coping app for people with fatigue after a stroke.
This will be a mobile app to register activities, and then score these according to how demanding they are experienced.
The app should also be able to predict the fatigue level for future activities, to help the user plan their everyday life.
The research is coordinated at Lovisenberg Hospital and our contact person there is Professor Anners Lerdal.
These days, we are also doing initial concept work for Ungkost, i.e. with interaction design.
It will be used in connection with the national dietary survey, as a tool for mapping
of children and young people's diet. This week we have had user tests on a prototype with 13/14-year-olds who
must register alone and 3/4-year-olds for parents fill in on behalf of the child.
The prototype now runs in a browser for practical reasons.
This is a collaboration with nutrition researchers at UiO with Mari Mohn Paulsen and Lene Frost Andersen.
Then we have the election diary in Danish.
It has previously been used in Norwegian municipal council and county council elections in Norway in 2019.
It will now be useful in the Danish general election, and was translated and adapted to a Danish context
This is a collaboration with the Department of Social Research at Signe Bock Segaard.
For those of you who are interested in mobile solutions for research and wonder about opportunities for
app development etc., so feel free to shoot the QR code for more information and point of contact.
When we receive requests for the development of new apps, there are usually a number of criteria that we look for
among other things, whether it is relevant then with a mobile app or a web application and about our expertise and
infrastructure is required for privacy reasons, and the research project has sufficient
financing for development.
Thank you for your attention
Thank you very much, Pål.
There are some pretty sick people using these apps. We have both heard about hand osteoarthritis, and you showed several other things.
Do you have any experience with people not being able to use the apps, that they are too old, or too rubbish to use apps.
Now it is often the research communities that administer the studies within their target group then, but we have
no concrete feedback that they are unable to use the apps, but it will be a relevant case
in the FatigueACt app, because there you have patients who have been through a stroke, so then we have a lot
focus on universal design
and to adapt it to the target group.
The video app, is it possible to say something more about when it will arrive?
Initially, it will be developed for NKVTS's therapy sessions and we are thinking of having an app
ready during the autumn, some time in the autumn, and the next phase will then be to make it generally available
for everyone who has access to TSD. So then we'll probably be out in the spring next year, I think.
Then I can only comment on the fact that there will be a general video app from us, but it will not work only
with Nettskjema, because we don't want to have videos stored in Nettskjema. You must have a project in Educloud or in TSD, and then you must
look at the video in there, that's how we intended it to be, but it will go via Nettskjema,
it allows us to scale quickly and offer this as a service to everyone who has a project in TSD or Educloud.
It will then be a general app on the same lines as the Dictaphone app, but the difference is that the Dictaphone app can only be used with Nettskjema.
You showed some diet apps, it's not a general diet research app?
No it's not, it's tailor-made, made for specific research projects.
So all the apps apart from these two are for own projects.
Then there will be lots of questions about the video app, when will the film app come out
I think there are about 20 questions about when the movie app is coming. We have to consider it a standing ovation and that people stand very much and wait
At least we have been verbally informed that there will be a general video app
which is designed for recording special categories of data in the film and which can be used for all types
research, depending on which project you deliver it to
We are very much looking forward to that and we know that this is very much anticipated
We can add that we created a solution for NKTVS that did not scale, and that has been part of the experience of having 100 iPads placed around
clinics to film, like a training program they have for therapists, but it didn't scale to more people using it
and therefore we have decided to create a new version. After all, it will then work against more of the general infrastructure.
Then there is a question here, who do you contact if you want to develop an app and how much does it cost, you have already said a little about that
Then they have to google mobile apps for research, the University of Oslo, then there is a common point of contact there
which is mobil-app@usit.uio.no. What happens is that Pål answers
on the email and then he says we can have a chat and then Pål and I will have a chat with you to discuss the premises, or whether it supports an application or the like
and then we take it from there. As Pål showed, there are some mobile apps that only cost 100,000 and then there are some that cost 3-4 million,
so it really depends on how complex the app is
It is a question of how to do that, that you sometimes save locally on your mobile without sending it, and wonder what types of data you save in the app.
There was already something about it earlier in this keynote today, but can you say something about which data we usually choose to store in the mobile app.
We use a minimization principle, that we actually store as little as possible on the mobile device and the data is forwarded to TSD
but in some cases we choose to store small amounts of data in order to give something back to the user.
For example, a graph or a plot or something that provides more value for users.
Can only add that there are several ways to store data in a mobile phone, in an app, and the way we store it in the apps is a way that
it is not backed up when you set up a backup of the entire phone. This means that when people change phones, they lose all the data that is located locally.
There have been challenges, but we have found pragmatic solutions to deal with it.
We must guarantee that the data is not backed up to, for example, cloud services that many people use to back up their entire phone.
Then we are happy to carry out a risk and vulnerability analysis together with the client, where there is a need for it.
Then there were a few more questions, we can take them now. When the app is not to be used for research, it can be linked to other TSD questions arise
I'm assuming he's talking about an app here that has been used against TSD and will continue maybe, but we don't really have any experience with that?
No, but there are people who want to use the app after it has been through the proof-of-concept in a research study
and want to make it general, or available to everyone
We can also assist with that, but we primarily work with research studies. Then when they are done with the research
And if the app is to live on, it is a different scenario. Then it is often other developers who have to take over.
It has then been the case that those who have done so for the time being have chosen not to collect data because they do not have any
basis for collecting data longer. But since it works, it has been left out because you know it works with the local data