Dr. Steve Ondersma is the C.S. Mott Endowed Professor of Public Health in the Charles Stewart Mott Department of Public Health at Michigan State University, and Director of the e-Health in Pregnancy (e-HELP) Lab.
Talk Title: Designing sophisticated and interactive digital interventions, without coding and at little to no cost: The Computerized Intervention Authoring System v. 3.0
Talk Abstract: The Computerized Intervention Authoring System (CIAS; www.cias.app) is an NIH-funded, open-source, non-commercial platform that enables researchers to easily develop, edit, and share sophisticated interactive content without coding of any kind. Interventions built with CIAS deploy as cross-platform compatible web/mobile web apps of any duration, with easy personalization, optional animated narrators who speak aloud in over 40 languages, and instant translation into any of over 100 languages. Researchers can either use the hosted platform to build and deploy their interventions (without worrying about the technicalities of platform maintenance) or deploy the platform on their server. This presentation will first highlight the rationale for, and advantages of, mobile web apps and no-code Software as a Service (SaaS) platforms. Second, it will present some of the specific applications built using this platform, along with findings from randomized trials. Finally, this presentation will propose a long-term vision of digital intervention research in which investigators collectively invest their time and resources into shared open-source no-code platforms that are widely used and accessible to all.