Lorraine Buis, Ph.D., assistant professor in the department of family medicine and at the U-M School of Information, joins a team based at Wayne State University to redesign an existing behavioral health intervention software program into a more usable, collaborative, and interoperable intervention science platform. The project is funded by the National Institute Of Biomedical Imaging And Bioengineering and led by Steven Ondersma, Ph.D., associate professor at Wayne State University.
Progress in the development and implementation of mobile health interventions has been slowed by factors such as the tremendous time and money needed to develop an intervention; limitations in cross-platform compatibility and interoperability; and lack of a consistent system around which to collaborate. To address these needs, Ondersma first developed the Computerized Intervention Authoring System (CIAS), which facilitates behavioral intervention science by allowing investigators to directly develop sophisticated and interactive mobile applications without programming.
CIAS is used by behavioral health research teams across the region, including an RO1-funded study led by Golfo Tzilos Wernette, Ph.D. [please link], assistant professor.
The grant will enable Ondersma’s team to address the limitations of the existing platform to transform CIAS into a free, open-source, and virtually unique non-commercial research resource that is optimized for large-scale collaborations in behavioral health intervention research.
Buis serves as a University of Michigan site co-investigator for the project. She will contribute to the redesign of the CIAS, initiating a thorough process of user interviews to design a new and intuitive interface as well as evidence-based user training and support materials.
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