Mohammad Hashemian & Nathaniel Osgood |
Acquisition of evidence regarding human behaviors and exposure to environments forms a central focus of health and social research, and an important foundation for effective policy in these areas. The use of smartphones devices to study health behavior via cross-linked sensor data and on-device self-reporting and crowdsourcing offers compelling advantages to complement traditional techniques. Data collected on such devices can be particularly powerful in supporting understanding of behaviors in areas where accurate self-reporting is difficult, including nutritional intake, physical activity and sedentary behaviour, contact patterns, and exposures to physical and social environments. Through structured surveys and crowdsourcing mechanisms, such devices can further provide potent means of gaining insight into knowledge, attitudes, beliefs, and perceptions in health and social domains. Finally, while little explored, some of the most powerful uses of such data lie in terms of understanding the particular causal pathways impacted by interventions.
This hands-on tutorial offers a high-level introduction to human behaviour data collection from mobile devices using the widely used Ethica Data system. Tutorial participants will be guided through use of this state-of-the-art mobile data collection system spanning the iOS (iPhones), Android and web platforms, its web‐based study, sensor and survey definition tools, adherence monitoring system, reporting system, and flexible Apache Kibana-based visualization toolkit. Coverage will include -- but will not be limited to -- the following:
Audience: Health, social and computational scientists. No programming background is required.
Organizers: Mohammad Hashemian, founder and the president of Ethica, holds a B.Sc. in Software Engineering and M.Sc. in Computer Science with the focus on Epidemiology and Public Health. He has been involved in design and rollout of 46 research projects using Ethica since 2016. Prior to founding Ethica, he was Platform Developer on Google Android TV.
Nathaniel Osgood: serves as Professor in the Dept. of Computer Science and Associate Faculty in the Dept. of Community Health & Epidemiology at U. Saskatchewan. He holds a B.Sc., M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT. His research focuses on providing cross-linked simulation, mobile health/big data, and machine learning tools to improve decision making in health and health care policy.