SRG's special needs
Frankly, one of SRG's motivations in moving to a new platform was the opportunity to work, in essence, on a clean slate. Over the past several years, SRG has learned a lot about field data collection and survey administration (having collected and analyzed data from more than 1500 participants), both with respect to subject psychology and to the mechanics of data collection. This new platform gives them the chance to assess everything that they have learned and incorporate it into a new, flexible system.

Some of SRG's requirements were really quite challenging and raised special issues for the new application and the PalmPilot hardware. One of the most daunting has to do with alarm volume. SRG's subjects carry the PalmPilot wherever they go; the application decides, based on recent subject behavior and responses, when to "interview" or "assess" the subject and collect data. Consequently, the subject can be just about anywhere when the interview (or assessment) is meant to start. However, the PalmPilot's standard alarm tone is not loud enough for all situations, and doesn't have a volume control (perhaps this is a case of Palm taking "unconscious portability" a bit too far). The new solution would have to deal with this platform limitation.

More interestingly, the new solution would need to incorporate what SRG has learned about subjects' psychological changes during the course of addiction cessation. SRG's research protocols address this directly. The PalmPilot-based application "learns" about the subject's progress based on interview responses and adjusts subsequent interview content and schedule based on those results.

Further, SRG's application challenged us to develop a truly friendly interface, because the subjects, in essence, interview themselves. SRG gives each subject a PalmPilot with the interview software loaded on it. The subject then carries the unit around at all times, and uses the device to record the information that SRG wants. In some cases, the application wakes up on its own and interrogates the user, too. At any rate, the application is being used throughout the day, in many locations, by untrained folks who are also stressed out about quitting smoking. Let me tell you that we worked hard to make the interface easy to use and straightforward. As an example, Figure A shows the application's main menu.

FIGURE A


The user interface is straightforward and easy to use. Roll over picture for a larger image.

Lastly, the new application has to be robust. SRG's application needs to run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. And the device must be dedicated to the interview engineÐsubjects are not allowed to poke around with any other applications.

Scriptable field data collection
Working with SRG, my team and I developed a general-purpoase field data collection application for the PalmPilot, with specialized code written to meet the needs of the SRG. We call this application RTSurvey. The core of RTSurvey is a robust scripting engine, upon which the rest of the application is written. In fact, the entire SRG application is written in these scripts, from the logic to schedule random interviews to the actual interview questions.