Developing Apps for Researching the COVID-19 Pandemic with the TrackYourHealth Platform
It addresses challenges in mobile health app development for researchers and developers, particularly in the medical field, but is incremental as it builds on existing mHealth and EMA concepts.
The paper presents TrackYourHealth, a configurable mobile platform for data collection and ecological momentary assessments, which enabled rapid development of two COVID-19-related apps within weeks to research physical and mental health during the pandemic.
Through lockdowns and other severe changes to daily life, almost everyone is affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Scientists and medical doctors are - among others - mainly interested in researching, monitoring, and improving physical and mental health of the general population. Mobile health apps (mHealth), and apps conducting ecological momentary assessments (EMA) respectively, can help in this context. However, developing such mobile applications poses many challenges like costly software development efforts, strict privacy rules, compliance with ethical guidelines, local laws, and regulations. In this paper, we present TrackYourHealth (TYH), a highly configurable, generic, and modular mobile data collection and EMA platform, which enabled us to develop and release two mobile multi-platform applications related to COVID-19 in just a few weeks. We present TYH and highlight specific challenges researchers and developers of similar apps may also face, especially when developing apps related to the medical field.