Stakeholders in the (e-)health domain often need to collect ordered data (e.g. order of preference) in a user-friendly way. However, these components are not easily available in the open-source or commercial solutions commonly used for data collection activities. In cases where they do exist, their customisation is limited, which leads researchers to limit the scope of their questions because of these technical restrictions.

Creating custom questionnaire components -while taking care to promote reusability- can overcome such problems. NISLAB created such a component for the purposes of research conducted by the European Academy of Allergy & Clinical Immunology (in collaboration with E. Vassilopoulou). This specific project focused on investigating the routine guidance provided by pediatricians concerning the timing of complementary feeding (CF) for both healthy infants and those at a heightened risk of allergies.

All data was collected using a purpose-built web platform, hosted by NISLAB which secured on-premises collection and analysis of data. The main questionnaire was divided into three sections with user-friendly multipart ranking questions. In these, participants were asked to select foods from each food category, as well as different cooking methods and food supplements, and arrange them in the order that they usually recommend for introduction into the infant’s diet, proceeding according to month of age, given from birth to 18 months

An example of this procedure can be seen below:

All of the questionnaire’s data was also translated into multiple languages, using expert-provided JSON files (figure above shows the English Translation).