Towards Process-Driven Mobile Data Collection Applications: Requirements, Challenges, Lessons Learned

In application domains like healthcare, psychology and e-learning, data collection is based on specifically tailored paper & pencil questionnaires. Usually, such a paper-based data collection is accomplished by a massive workload regarding the processing, analysis, and evaluation of the data collected. To relieve domain experts from these manual tasks and to increase the efficiency of the data collection process, we developed a generic approach for realizing process-driven smart mobile device applications based on process management technology. According to this approach, the logic of a questionnaire is described in terms of an explicit process model whose enactment is driven by a generic process engine. Our goal is to demonstrate that such a process-aware design of mobile business applications is useful with respect to mobile data collection. Hence, we developed a generic architecture comprising the main components of mobile data collection applications. Furthermore, we used these components for developing mobile electronic questionnaires for psychological studies. The paper presents the challenges identified in this context and discusses the lessons learned. Overall, process management technology offers promising perspectives for developing mobile business applications at a high level of abstraction.