beiwe

Users need to grant Beiwe permissions to send notifications and access their location for the application to work properly. They will be prompted to give the app permission to send notifications when they register. They will also be asked for access to location, when registering, select ‘While using the app.”

After this is done, log into settings, search ‘Beiwe,’ and give Beiwe your permission to ‘always’ access location there. This is imperative for the Beiwe app to work.

Notifications should be set to Banners, Sounds, and Badges and should also be ‘Persistent,’ as indicated in the video.

The Beiwe apps are updated whenever there is a new feature or bug fix. Below is information on how to update the apps on both Android and iOS phones.

Android

When there is a new update for Android, it will be the standard release on studies.beiwe.org/download and on the Google Play Store.

If you have research projects in progress, your study participants will be unaffected by this release as we do not automatically update the app. Your study participants will continue to run on the previous release. It will not cause any data analysis issues if you are in the midst of enrolling study participants and some of your cohort is on the old version while others are on the new version. However, if you want to use the updated app (including the related new features and fixes) you should instruct your patient to re-download the app from studies.beiwe.org/download (there is no need to uninstall the app and re-install). The user will be prompted “Do you want to install an update to this existing application?” Choose Yes, Open and Install and the update is complete. For those using the Google Play Store, you can update the app from the Google Play Store.

Apple

As most iPhone users configure their phones to automatically update their apps, Beiwe will be automatically updated on most of your user’s phones. If they do not, they should simply go to the App Store, search Beiwe and click update. New participants will automatically download this new version of Beiwe from the App Store and the registration process remains the same.

We have recently released a new halt data collection feature. Using this feature, a researcher can unregister a phone from inside the web interface on studies.beiwe.org, and that will block the participant’s phone from uploading any further data.

The phone might continue to collect data if the participant hasn’t uninstalled the app, but it would just sit on the phone in an encrypted state, and it wouldn’t be possible for the participant or anyone who obtains the participant’s phone to decrypt it. Once the participant uninstalls the app, all data collected by the app that’s still on the phone will be automatically deleted.

Beiwe Service Center (BSC) studies are run on the Onnela Lab production instance of Beiwe. This includes the latest version of the software and the Onnela Lab Amazon Web Services (AWS) server.

To start a BSC study, the first step is getting your cost estimate. BSC pricing is based on three variables:

1. How many study participants you plan to enroll (N)
2. How long you collect data for each study participant (t in months)
3. How long you expect this research to last (T in months) I.E. The time from the enrollment of the first participant to finish of data collection on the last enrolled study participant, this includes any additional time needed for study admin and data download.

The BSC arrangement requires you to sign a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) which provides the software “as is” and asks for your IRB protocol and approval. Many people ask if a DUA is needed, and the Harvard policy is that we only need to have an MOU based on the services we provide. However, each institution needs to decide what is appropriate for them.

The Onnela Lab will set up a study for you once the cost has been agreed upon and your MOU has been signed. The study will include the passive data settings that make sense for your study and give you a login to your study on the Beiwe backend. BSC users can request Beiwe access for up to five users that are on your IRB. Anyone with access to the system can enter survey questions and schedule them for release. The backend is also where you’ll generate user IDs and passwords for your study participants. The Beiwe app is available on the App Store for Apple users and can be downloaded from the web and Google Play Store for Android users. To see what passive data parameters can be collected, view the Beiwe wiki.

Please click the image to the left to start the video.

To install Beiwe and register on an Android phone open a mobile browser on the smartphone and navigate to: https://studies.beiwe.org/download

Opening this URL on an Android smartphone will cause the app to automatically download to the phone.

Open Beiwe.apk in the “Downloads” or “Files” section of the phone, depending on the participant’s preference, hit Next, Install, and Open to navigate through the screens and install the app.

As the Beiwe app is downloaded directly from the study website, and not from the Google Play store, there may be a warning message on a participant’s phone during download (depending on the version of Android software that is currently running on the phone). It might also be necessary to adjust the Security Settings on the phone to “Allow Apps from Unknown Sources” on the phone. If you run into any issues please direct to FAQs and Beiwe Troubleshooting for more information.