Management system for experiments using smartphone based monitoring technologies

The emergence of smartphones not only bring great changes to people's daily lives, but also give rise to new monitoring technology approaches that can be applied in scientific research. Smartphone based monitoring technologies can be used to measure, gather and process data provided by user or automatically collected by the device. Researchers have used mobile phone-based monitoring technologies in their experiments. Smartphones has several benefits over the traditional paper and-pencil approach, automatically transforming the gathered information into digital format which can save time and budget for experiments. However, with the new monitoring technologies, there are still many problems in the process and researchers face challenges when setting up and managing those experiments involving several users (panellists) and researchers. Issues include recruitment of participants and the problem of how to keep contact with all participants. To manage the whole process to help better exploit the new capabilities that have become available to carry out experiments and gather data in various fields, a support system is needed. The objective of this thesis is to design and implement a web-based experiment management system to help researchers who are choosing smartphone based monitoring technologies. Constructive research was chosen as the research methodology. The study started from a requirement analysis about managing scientific research experiments. Followed by design and construction of a new system as the solution to improve the experiment management. A prototype system RePotal was developed and the feasibility of the solution was tested. Feedback from researchers was collected for further development work