71 2.2.5 Unidad hipotética

Interviews were conducted not only to get ideas for tool functionality and design, but also to validate ideas with regards to the need of having EUD tools for developing applications in the domain of mHealth.

2.3.1 An Interview with a Researcher

The Objectives. From the survey conducted with the members of the WeP project (section 2.2.1), only one of the participants during that time uses some application running on a mobile device for her research. An interview was conducted with this researcher for the purpose of knowing more about what she was working on, and what development-related problems she encountered along the way.

7 _{A midwife is "a person trained to assist a woman during childbirth. Additional tasks would be to}

provide prenatal care, birth education to both parents, and care for mothers and their babies after birth. Depending on the local law, midwives may deliver babies in the mother’s home, clinic or in a hospital."[Mid]

8 _{During the design and development of the Mobia Framework, data models were not really focused}

on because of the fact that this information depends on different projects. This responsibility should be taken care of the ones designing and developing code templates for the different platforms.

9 _{http://openmrs.org/wiki/OpenMRS}

10 _{Most of the applications they are concentrating on right now involves diaries and forms that is why}

The Interviewee. The interviewee is a researcher at the Institute of Medical Psychology at LMU. The primary focus of her research is on Circadian Rhythms in real life cognition and shift work settings11 _[201a].

Her Research. The applications she was using for her fieldwork were related to Psy- chophysical Tests and Psychomotor Vigilance Tests which were running on a personal digital assistant (PDA). According to her, this type of experiments can only be conducted in laboratories in the past. However, with the advent of mobile devices, it was possible to bring the experiments to where the test subjects are located (e.g. in the office location of the shift workers). Some examples of the parameters she needed to measure were reaction times and accuracy.

Her Problems. According to her, the tasks performed by her test subjects (i.e. Shift workers) on the PDA were relatively simple tasks. However, the challenge for her was on the modification of the applications that were initially developed by a programmer. Since the programmer was no longer available, she had to modify parts of the code herself in order to extend the application a bit, orcorrect some functionalities that were not properly done by the programmer because of some misunderstanding on the specifications.

Fortunately she had a little bit of programming background (e.g. MatLab), so it was still possible for her to understand the code and modify it herself. She did not like the idea of having so many files and forms in the development environment (i.e. Visual Studio) and having to figure out the relationship between them in order to correct or add a certain functionality. She wanted some tool with a visual interface where one can just drag and drop components in order to create an application. In the beginning, she also had to find a the device with the right specifications that would be used for such experiments.

The Need for a tool like the Mobia Modeler. She expressed her desire in having a tool to ease her pain in developing these applications so that she can just concentrate on the objective of her research and not worry about the programming part herself.

2.3.2 An Interview with a Medical Expert

The Objectives. The objectives for conducting this interview were enumerated in sec- tion 2.2.4.

The Interviewee. In order to collect general feedback from experts in the medical field, interviews with Dr. Alvin B. Marcelo were conducted together with his team from the

NThC. Dr. Alvin B. Marcelo 12 _{is a general and trauma surgeon by training, and did}

his postdoctoral fellowship in medical informatics at the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland. He is currently the manager of the International Open Source Network for ASEAN+3, an Associate Professor and Chief at the Medical Informatics Unit at the UP College of Medicine, and the director of the University of the Philippines Manila, National Telehealth Center (NThC). The NThC is working with doctors in remote areas who have limited access to technology. Since mobile networks and devices are the most accessible in these remote areas, they are looking into technologies (e.g. platforms, tools) and approaches related to mobile technologies that they could use.

General Feedback. The initial part of the interview was a presentation of the Mobia Framework which included a brief overview of the goals for creating such framework, the different parts of the framework, and a brief demonstration of how the whole process works from modeling to code generation.

The feedback from Dr. Marcelo was13_:

" I see the value. I think it’s very powerful. The approach of having people using it, or the domain experts design the things that they will be using is a very practical and empowering paradigm. The dependence on the programmers is removed.

Although the programming side is not yet perfect, the one converting from model to source code, at least from the modeling side, it’s already making a big dif- ference. Since the doctors who are designing how it looks like, there is already a sense of ownership. The part where the source code has to be done can be followed later on. Giving the doctor the ability to create the forms or the look and feel, there’s already an advantage to that, because they already have a role at the outset.

The code at the back will be the problem of the programmers. But it just makes it easier since the programmers will see right away what parts the doctors want to have in terms of interface. " - Dr. Alvin Marcelo, National Telehealth Center

More detailed feedback were given when he and the rest of his team answered the survey questions which were presented in section 2.2.4.

12 _{http://www.alvinmarcelo.com/}

13 _{The original comments from Dr. Marcelo was a mix of Tagalog and English. Therefore, some parts}