movisensXS July 2016 Update

This update is all about privacy and improving the experience for the participant. Please read the following changes carefully!

The update of the web portal will happen on Monday on 04.06.2016 at 22:00 o'clock (UTC+1, Berlin time zone). There will be a planned downtime of about 30 minutes. 

The update of the movisensXS app (Version 1.0) will happen in approximately two weeks. The beta version will roll out tomorrow. As always, if you are running a productive study, if possible, please disable auto-updates for the movisensXS App because the new user interface of movisensXS may confuse your participants. This is especially important on Android 5+ smartphones with activated "Lock Other Apps" functionality, because running studies are stopped when the update is installed automatically and a new permission has to be granted to continue the study.
This version is the last version supporting smartphones with an Android version below 4.0. If you use a older smartphone please check if an Android update is available.

Informed Consent

We added an informed consent start screen to the movisensXS app. When a participant starts a study he has to review and accept the following:

  • An informed consent that you can define for your study in the study settings (optional).
  • An informed consent from movisens, that gives us the approval to process the data of the participant. We also allow participants to opt-out of our app crash reporting provider Crashlytics.
  • A screen that lists all the required permissions in your study. This gives the participant transparency about the data that is acquired during your study. On Android 6 and above the participant has to grant some of these permissions manually and we guide the participants through the process of granting them so your study can run smoothly.  

The following shows the new behavior when a study is started:

This behavior only applies to studies that are not yet coupled to smartphones. Already coupled studies or studies with an older app do not show these screens, except for Android 6 Smartphones.

Better Alarm and Forms handling

From the home screen a participant can directly take an alarm or continue a form. These are shown as cards on the home screen.

Improvements of the web portal

  • More and more private smartphones of participants are used. This is why we removed the "Smartphones" tab in the web portal. We no longer store any device specific ids. Please backup your device IDs if you need to know which participant used which Smartphone.
  • The results table changed: The "Device" column is removed and the columns "Trigger_date" and "Trigger_time" are added. This allows checking when an alarm was issued and when a participant started to complete a form.
  • We also updated our terms of service to improve the privacy even further. The new terms of service will be available after the update here: https://xs.movisens.com/tos
  • An updated item format gallery with new images will be available after the update:https://xs.movisens.com/help/forms#item_formats

But there are even more movisensXS app improvements

  • We added support for Android 6 Marshmallow (permissions and alarms)
  • Phone numbers are now hashed by movisensXS generated identifier (hashes stay the same per participant).
  • Minor UI changes for the toolbar buttons
  • Changed look and feel of button pressed to new card design
  • Added new lock other apps mechanism to support newer devices
  • Overflow menus will now be shown on every device
  • Back button can now be used to go back in message view
  • Retry upload of results automatically if no internet connection was available.
  • Added imprint and terms of service in settings
  • Added privacy enhancements for Android 6 (no autobackup allowed)
  • Added new barcode scanning
  • Added SART cognitive test
  • Fixed bug where photos and videos aren't deleted after upload to server
  • Fixed bug where movisens is restarted after an app receives an update (now only when movisensXS receives an update)
  • Fixed bug with battery low condition
  • Fixed back button wasn't disabled bug when allowBack was false
  • Fixed bug with whitespaces in mutable value names
  • Fixed autocorrect bug on motorola razer
  • Fixed validation of IntentAction
  • Fixed emoticon problems in free textfields
  • Fixed scrolling behaviour on large textitems
  • Fixed coupledialog
  • Fixed memory leaks
  • Changed to Google maps v2
  • Changed to Google Play Services 8.1

And some improvements of beta features

  • Participant defined time triggers can now be repeated and saved as mutable items
  • Added Geofence Trigger
  • Optimized location algorithm for new Google Play Services

Yeah, what a release. As always, let us know if you have any questions. Please spread the word and tell your colleagues about our great new features.