Research Article
A Web-Based Tool for Automatic Data Collection,
Curation, and Visualization of Complex Healthcare Survey
Studies including Social Network Analysis
José Alberto Benítez,
1
José Emilio Labra,
2
Enedina Quiroga,
3
Vicente Martín,
4
Isaías García,
1
Pilar Marqués-Sánchez,
3
and Carmen Benavides
1
1
Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering, Universidad de Le´ on, Campus de Vegazana, s/n, 24071 Le´ on, Spain
2
Department of Computer Science, Universidad de Oviedo, C/Calvo Sotelo, s/n, 33007 Oviedo, Spain
3
SALBIS Research Group, Facultad de Ciencias de la Salud, Campus de Ponferrada, Avda Astorga, s/n, Ponferrada, 24402 Le´ on, Spain
4
GIGAS Research Group, Facultad de Ciencias de la Salud, Campus de Vegazana, s/n, 24071 Le´ on, Spain
Correspondence should be addressed to Jos´ e Alberto Ben´ ıtez; jbena@unileon.es
Received 17 February 2017; Accepted 12 April 2017; Published 26 April 2017
Academic Editor: Ernestina Menasalvas
Copyright © 2017 Jos´ e Alberto Ben´ ıtez et al. Tis is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution
License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly
cited.
Tere is a great concern nowadays regarding alcohol consumption and drug abuse, especially in young people. Analyzing the social
environment where these adolescents are immersed, as well as a series of measures determining the alcohol abuse risk or personal
situation and perception using a number of questionnaires like AUDIT, FAS, KIDSCREEN, and others, it is possible to gain insight
into the current situation of a given individual regarding his/her consumption behavior. But this analysis, in order to be achieved,
requires the use of tools that can ease the process of questionnaire creation, data gathering, curation and representation, and later
analysis and visualization to the user. Tis research presents the design and construction of a web-based platform able to facilitate
each of the mentioned processes by integrating the diferent phases into an intuitive system with a graphical user interface that hides
the complexity underlying each of the questionnaires and techniques used and presenting the results in a fexible and visual way,
avoiding any manual handling of data during the process. Advantages of this approach are shown and compared to the previous
situation where some of the tasks were accomplished by time consuming and error prone manipulations of data.
1. Introduction
Computing and Information Science play a more and more
important role in healthcare studies and applications [1].
A lot of healthcare studies dealing with life habits consist
in cross-sectional or epidemiological surveys using a great
amount of information gathered from the subjects by means
of diferent questionnaires. While information obtained from
these studies is very useful for both research and healthcare
professionals, the management and analysis of data is many
times cumbersome and leads to long and tedious processes
carried out by humans, which also implies the possibility of
being error prone.
Data gathering is usually carried out with online surveys
designed and created with well-known free (e.g., Google Docs
[2], SurveyMonkey [3]) or commercial solutions. Tese tools
provide an easy way of creating and obtaining data from ques-
tionnaires, but with a number of drawbacks. First, they are
generic tools, not aimed at any specifc domain, though some
of them include healthcare oriented templates and provide
data protection and security services. Many of them provide
simple capabilities for the type of questions to be created
and, moreover, they require building each question in the
survey from scratch, without the possibility of reusing other
questionnaires or parts of them. When obtaining the results,
the great majority of tools store data from individual’s answers
in the form of plain datasheets making the later processing
and visualization of data difcult, especially when dealing
with complex questions. Tere is no tool incorporating an
integrated set of features as the one developed during this
research, which includes functionalities for the creation of
Hindawi
Computational and Mathematical Methods in Medicine
Volume 2017, Article ID 2579848, 8 pages
https://doi.org/10.1155/2017/2579848