Open Source tailoring project

[Fred Trotter]

At the mobilehealth.org conference that I am just coming away from, I
heard lots about other Open Source tools for behavioral health.

One of the most impressive was the Michigan Tailoring System.

http://chcr.umich.edu/mts/

This system is a Java stack that allows you researchers to meta-
program content that is delivered based on the responses to different
well-formed questions.

For instance, you might want to display an image that a user can
relate to, like a picture of an older man if the user is a male over
60.... Of course you can also program what text gets displayed.

Clever software: the screencast is worth watching.

Are there other similar systems that people have heard of? Open Source
or otherwise?

-FT

[Eric Hekler]

Hi, all.

   There are several that I'm aware of that are being developed.  

Here are a few:

http://web.mit.edu/wockets/

http://relationalagents.com/publications/IVA09.litebody.pdf

http://pomi.stanford.edu/content.php?page=about

http://openmhealth.org/

   We should see if we can organize all of these.  I'm friends with the folks that developed all of these and would be interested in organizing everyone together around trying to create a common community.  I think we should be learning a lot from Apache though when we are getting in to this.  The key to Apache is that it is both open source but also it has a very good licensing agreement: http://www.apache.org/licenses/

 I don't know enough about licensing but I do understand human motivations.  We need to be very mindful of ways to make it so that the community acknowledges work in the space while also fostering openness and iteration.  

   As I am a behavioral scientist, I'm not particularly helpful with the tools.  That said, I am working on developing a subgroup of folks at the Society of Behavioral Medicine (SBM.org) focused on developing tools that can quickly summarize research evidence to help individuals develop evidence-informed interventions.    We are just starting to meet so I don't have anything more to share right now but I will share more after we meet.

Best,
Eric

-- 
Eric Hekler, Ph.D.
Post Doctoral Research Fellow
Stanford Prevention Research Center
Medical School Office Building: Mail Code 5411
251 Campus Drive
Stanford, CA 94305-5411 
Office # (650) 721-2516 
Fax:  650-725-6247
Email: ehe...@stanford.edu

Twitter: @ehekler