KORPUS is a mobile application for collecting pain data in research settings. A participant marks on a body map the location, the intensity, and the type of pain they are experiencing. Entries from across a study population are then gathered into heat maps, which visualise how pain develops over the course of a study, where it concentrates within different subgroups, and whether an intervention shifts those patterns. Seeing the whole population at once is what turns individual reports into something a researcher can draw better conclusions from.
Two parts of the application are being released as open source: the heat mapping method and the structure of the pain questionnaire.
Heat maps and questionnaire structure
The heat mapping method turns scattered individual entries into a picture that can be read and compared visually. The questionnaire structure addresses the other side of the process: how to ask about pain in the first place, so that the answers remain useful afterwards.
Both are useful to any group doing this kind of research, not only to the one the application was originally built for. That is the reason for opening the modules; the intention is to support open science by making the methods themselves available, rather than only the results they produce.
From embedded code to standalone modules
The heat mapping and the questionnaire were built as part of one application, for one study. They are not modular yet, and that is what has to change before anyone else can use them.
This grant covers exactly that work: reshaping both components so each one stands on its own, with clear boundaries and nothing tying it back to the parts that stay closed. Documentation in English and Finnish follows once the structure is in place.
Methods that others can check and reuse
For someone who did not build the original application, making the components usable also means making the methods understandable. This matters because pain is subjective and hard to measure. Pain research has no agreed shared way of interpreting it, which makes results from different studies difficult to compare with each other.
This open, documented method can be inspected and repeated. Another research group can take these components, adapt them to their own setup, and get going. Results produced with the same underlying methods are also easier to compare, which is the part that is hard to get any other way.
KORPUS iOS– ja Android–yhteensopivan kipudatan keräys– ja visualisointisovelluksen kehittämiseen.
Kiia Nieminen sai Fuugin säätiöltä 2 000 euron apurahan KORPUS iOS– ja Android–yhteensopivan kipudatan keräys– ja visualisointisovelluksen kehittämiseen.
Fuugin säätiö jakaa apurahoja avointen tietojärjestelmien ja avoimen lähdekoodin ohjelmistojen kehittämiseen liittyvään työhön. Säätiön jatkuvaan apurahahakuun voi jättää hakemuksen milloin tahansa. Sama hakija tai hanke voi myös hakea avustusta useita kertoja.