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Background: Tinnitus is often described as the phantom perception of a sound and is experienced by 5.1% to 42.7% of the population worldwide, at least once during their lifetime. The symptoms often reduce the patient's quality of life. The TrackYourTinnitus (TYT) mobile health (mHealth) crowdsensing platform was developed for two operating systems (OS)-Android and iOS-to help patients demystify the daily moment-to-moment variations of their tinnitus symptoms. In all platforms developed for more than one OS, it is important to investigate whether the crowdsensed data predicts the OS that was used in order to understand the degree to which the OS is a confounder that is necessary to consider.
Smart sensors and smartphones are becoming increasingly prevalent. Both can be used to gather environmental data (e.g., noise). Importantly, these devices can be connected to each other as well as to the Internet to collect large amounts of sensor data, which leads to many new opportunities. In particular, mobile crowdsensing techniques can be used to capture phenomena of common interest. Especially valuable insights can be gained if the collected data are additionally related to the time and place of the measurements. However, many technical solutions still use monolithic backends that are not capable of processing crowdsensing data in a flexible, efficient, and scalable manner. In this work, an architectural design was conceived with the goal to manage geospatial data in challenging crowdsensing healthcare scenarios. It will be shown how the proposed approach can be used to provide users with an interactive map of environmental noise, allowing tinnitus patients and other health-conscious people to avoid locations with harmful sound levels. Technically, the shown approach combines cloud-native applications with Big Data and stream processing concepts. In general, the presented architectural design shall serve as a foundation to implement practical and scalable crowdsensing platforms for various healthcare scenarios beyond the addressed use case.
The increasing prevalence of smart mobile devices (e.g., smartphones) enables the combined use of mobile crowdsensing (MCS) and ecological momentary assessments (EMA) in the healthcare domain. By correlating qualitative longitudinal and ecologically valid EMA assessment data sets with sensor measurements in mobile apps, new valuable insights about patients (e.g., humans who suffer from chronic diseases) can be gained. However, there are numerous conceptual, architectural and technical, as well as legal challenges when implementing a respective software solution. Therefore, the work at hand (1) identifies these challenges, (2) derives respective recommendations, and (3) proposes a reference architecture for a MCS-EMA-platform addressing the defined recommendations. The required insights to propose the reference architecture were gained in several large-scale mHealth crowdsensing studies running for many years and different healthcare questions. To mention only two examples, we are running crowdsensing studies on questions for the tinnitus chronic disorder or psychological stress. We consider the proposed reference architecture and the identified challenges and recommendations as a contribution in two respects. First, they enable other researchers to align our practical studies with a baseline setting that can satisfy the variously revealed insights. Second, they are a proper basis to better compare data that was gathered using MCS and EMA. In addition, the combined use of MCS and EMA increasingly requires suitable architectures and associated digital solutions for the healthcare domain.