ANTARIS - AN INTERNET-OF-THINGS-BASED SYSTEM FOR AT-HOME HEALTH INTERVENTIONS

Abstract

Throughout the years, researchers have found that with long-term studies, there was difficulties maintaining constant user participation. Some of this is due to participants not having the means to attend in-person to participate in the study, which is why researchers have shifted to conducting studies online so participants can partake in them remotely. Web surveys or apps have been used to conduct these studies; however, these methods have also proven to be unsustainable as participants do not find them interactive nor entertaining enough. As a result, our sponsor has identified the need and potential to utilize voice command technology to conduct these studies. Our sponsor, the Center of Biomedical Informatics and Biostatistics (CB2) have decided that the best solution is to utilize an Amazon Alexa device to conduct these at-home health interventions, as at the time, Alexa was the only one to support third party Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)-certified skills. However, in the middle of our project, Alexa no longer supports this, which was why we shifted to no longer collecting any protected health information (PHI). At the conclusion of this project, despite the hurdles we went through, we were able to successfully meet our system requirements, which was to allow for remote and verbal survey deliveries and data collection from participant, as well as for the ability for researchers conducting studies to view a summary of the survey metrics and export responses. We were also able to accomplish a visual component of this survey delivery system through an Alexa device. Furthermore, our system was built with a modular design that allows for our sponsor to access the various components easily for future developments of the skill. We were also able to conduct user testing for both participants and researchers and incorporated their feedback into our system. Our sponsor aims to certify our Alexa skill with Amazon after further integration with MyDataHelps, the existing survey delivery system we use, and their HIPAA-compliant database so that it can officially be used to conduct studies.