VENUS Appliance

VENUS is a Virtual Enrollment Notification and Update System created to make the process of recruitment for clinical research studies more user friendly. It's an easy button for research!

Clinical Workflow

A clinician identifies a patient that may be eligible for a research study. The clinician pushes the buttons that correspond to the study on the keypad followed by the # key. This sends a message to one or more study coordinators by pager, sms, and/or email. The study coordinator then finds the clinician and gathers the appropriate information. No personal health information/identification is sent via VENUS.

Technical Workflow

VENUS uses devices in the Particle family of projects (photon and electron) to interpret keypresses and send information (keypad.ino), via webhook, to a predefined php script (n.php). The script matches the keypress to a particular study (DEVICE_ID.json) and sends sms and email messages to the defined study coordinators using the Twilio and Postmark APIs, respectively.

Assembly Instructions

Tools & Materials

Required

• Particle Photon or Electron
• 4x4 membrane keypad (Ebay), (AliExpress), (Adafruit 3x4)
• Micro USB cable (Ebay), (AliExpress), (Adafruit) and some sort of usb power adapter (Ebay), (AliExpress)
• X-Acto (or other sharp) knife
• 8 long male headers. I used these from Sparkfun.
• A webserver capable of running PHP. I use Dreamhost. There are "free" PHP hosts out there, but I've never tried any of them. If you do, please feel free to share your experience via pull request to this readme.

Optional, but may make things easier

• Drill with a set of small drill bits.
• Dremel
• Hot glue gun
• The enclosure of your choice. I simply used the plastic case that came with the Electron and it worked beautifully. I outline that process below.

Installation and Assembly

Setting up the Third Party Services

Postmark

• If you want to send emails from your VENUS device, you'll need a Postmark account.
• create a new Postmark account - At the time of this writing, new users get 25,000 emails for free.
• log in to your newly created account and click 'Sender Signatures'
  • add a new signature
• log in to your newly created account and click 'Servers'
  • add a new server
  • after that server has been created, click 'credentials' and copy the SERVER API TOKEN -- you'll ultimately paste this into the DEVICE_ID.json file.

Twilio

• If you want to send SMS messages from your VENUS device, you'll need a Twilio account.
• create a new Twilio account
• log in to your newly created account and go to the dashboard
  • you will likely need to add funds to your account
  • from the dashboard, copy the ACCOUNT SID and AUTH TOKEN -- you'll ultimately paste both of these into the DEVICE_ID.json file.

Setting up the Particle Electron

• create an account with Particle (if you didn't do it when you ordered a device)
• claim the electron
  • go to setup.particle.io/start
  • choose 'Setup an Electron w/SIM card' and follow the on-screen instructions
  • enter the ICCID number (19..22 digits) and click 'Next'
  • if things go as planned, your device will now be active and visible in your particle dashboard
• create a Particle webhook
  • click 'Webhook' then click 'Custom JSON'
  • copy and paste the following code into the editor

{
    "event": "YOUR-WEBHOOK-NAME",
    "url": "http://YOUR-WEBSITE-URL/n.php",
    "requestType": "GET",
	"query": {
		"id":"{{SPARK_EVENT_VALUE}}",
		"location":"{{SPARK_CORE_ID}}"
	},
    "mydevices": true
}

• change YOUR-WEBHOOK-NAME to the name of your choice
• change YOUR-WEBSITE-URL to the URL of the website you plan to set up in the next step
• modify (around line 60) keypad.ino to include YOUR-WEBHOOK-NAME that you chose above: Particle.publish("YOUR-WEBHOOK-NAME", String(value), 60, PRIVATE);
• navigate to build.particle.io
  • choose the 'Devices' icon from the menu on the left and select your device (unless you have multiple devices, there will likely be only one option to choose from) -- the star beside the device should be yellow
  • choose the 'Code' icon from the menu on the left
    • paste the code from keypad.ino into the editor on the right side of the build.particle.io page
    • click the 'Verify' icon
    • click the 'Save' icon
  • choose the 'Libraries' icon from the menu on the left
    • under 'Community Libraries' type keypad into the search box
    • click KEYPAD
    • click the INCLUDE IN APP button
    • choose the KEYPAD app from the list
  • go back to the 'Code' view (by clicking the 'code' icon)
    • click the 'Flash' icon -- you should see a message at the bottom of the screen saying the flash was successful

Setting up the Webserver

A note about DEVICE_ID.json This file name will change for every device you set up. The DEVICE_ID is assigned by Particle, the makers of the photon and electron devices. To find the DEVICE_ID for all of the devices associated with your account, log in to the Particle Dashboard.

• change DEVICE_ID.json to include the location of the device, the location description, the callback number, and the 'ask for' value.
• change DEVICE_ID.json to include your Twilio and Postmark settings.
• upload the following files to your webserver
  • /assets/
  • /files/
  • legend.php
  • n.php
  • DEVICE_ID.json AFTER you changed the name to the actual device id. (ex 2300399944567gihew721127.json)

Building the Case

• modify the case
• place the breadboard
• place the electron
• place and connect the antenna
• place and connect the keypad
• plug in and close the case

What I've learned. Ideas for future development and enhancement.

• Build a password protected index.html page where config files and legends can be viewed.
• Set up basic http authentication in the webhooks for added security.