Process-Driven Mobile Data Collection (Extended Abstract)

Structured instruments are commonly used to collect data in various application domains (e.g., psychology). Still, the former are handled in a traditional paper-based fashion. In this context, the widespread use of smart mobile devices offers promising perspectives with respect to the con-trolled collection of high-quality data. The design, implementation and deployment of such mobile data collection applications, however, is challenging in several respects, turning both the program-ming and maintenance of mobile data collection applications into a costly, time-consuming, and error-prone endeavor. In order to empower domain experts to create mobile data collection applica-tions themselves, a powerful framework, applying process management concepts in a broader scope, was developed. The framework enables the development of sophisticated mobile data collection ap-plications by orders of magnitude faster compared to current practices on one hand. On the other, domain experts are relieved from manual tasks, like digitizing the data collected.