A Digital Infrastructure for Storing & Sharing Internet of Things, Wearables and App-Based Research Study Data

In health and behavioural sciences, there has been a shift towards use of mobile, wearable and IoT based frequent granular data collection strategies to capture temporal patterns and environmental changes. There are a wide range of free and easy-to-use services that allow researchers to design and deploy intermittent assessments and surveys. However, there is a lack of tools suitable for frequent or real-time data collection. This paper outlines DROPS (Flinders Data Repository for Open Science) software infrastructure, that provides an easy-to-use web-based service for researchers to upload real-time research study data gathered from study participants devices into cloud storage as well as coordinate sharing of data with other researchers for secondary research. The infrastructure developed by Flinders University as part of a collaboration project with the Australian National Data Service, runs on a server, receives the data through an API interface, and stores in a no-SQL database. The solution eliminates the barriers of setting up back-end infrastructure to manage the reception and storage of research data assessed in real-time environments.