A Generic Engine Allowing an Automatic Evaluation of Data Collection Instruments

Most of the time, clinical data is still collected using paper-based questionnaires, even though this traditional approach has several limitations compared to electronic data collection. For example, each questionnaire has to be printed and handed out to each test person. Furthermore, the digitization and analysis of collected data is very time-consuming and labor-intensive. The QuestionSys project aims to solve most of these problems by providing a sophisticated framework. The latter supports the complete digital data collection process, including the creation, deployment, execution, analysis and archiving of the questionnaires. At different times, collected data of a questionnaire has to be analyzed and evaluated. For example, collected data already has to be evaluated during execution of the questionnaire, in order to determine the further course of the questionnaire. Furthermore, it has to be evaluated after the questionnaire is completed. In order to make evaluation of the data possible within the QuestionSys framework, questionnaires can contain rules, which have to be evaluated. For the purpose of evaluating these rules, a rule evaluation engine is developed in the course of this thesis. The main focus is to develop an engine, which eliminates different problems that come along with evaluation of expressions during execution time. Furthermore, this engine should be easily extensible and has to be usable on different platforms.