Experience Building IT Infrastructure for Research with Online Youth Mental Health Tools

Abstract

There is great potential for online tools to be helpful for youth mental health, but equally there are many open research questions requiring field trials. Such research places considerable demands on IT infrastructure to provide appropriate data management, and to be maintainable and scalable through iterations of studies. We report experience building an IT infrastructure for research with online tools for youth mental health. The aim is to create a platform that enables an 'ecosystem' of youth mental health software to be available for field trials and beneficial usage. Key services of the platform include identity management, health assessment storage and reasoning, usage logging, and clinical trial consent and randomisation. This paper reports initial design of the platform, first field tests and ongoing iterative development.