CARP Research Package is a Flutter package for building research study apps on Android and iOS using Flutter.

CARP Research Package is a Flutter implementation of the Apple ResearchKit available for iOS, just like ResearchStack is for Android. The overarching goal of the CARP Research Package is to;

… enable developers and researchers to design and build cross-platform (iOS and Android) research applications using the same codebase.

The API and UX design of Research Package follows the API and UX of ResearchKit with a few adaptations to Flutter, including applying more to a reactive programming model.

Research Package – Left: support for obtaining informed consents including a signature. Right: Survey collecting multiple Likert-scale data and other type of data.

What can you do with Research Package?

Research Package is designed from the ground up to meet the requirements of most scientific research, including capturing participant consent, extensible input tasks, and the security and privacy needs necessary for IRB approval. The main features of CARP Research Package are:

  • Obtaining informed consent from participants, including support for a signature.
  • Creating surveys and questionnaires with a wide range of answer formats (e.g., likert scale, date pickers, image pickers, etc.), such as the WHO5 survey.

In order to get started with using Research Package, please read the tutorial on its software architecture and API.

CARP Research Package is part of the overall CACHET Research Platform (CARP) with also provides a Flutter package for mobile and wearable sensing – CAMS. By combining CARP Research Package with CAMS, support for what is called “Active Tasks” in ResearchKit can be implemented. Some of the Active Tasks have already been implemented in the Cognition Package where 14 cognitive tests are available as an extension of Research Package.

Like the rest of the CARP components, Research Package for Flutter is open source under a MIT License and is available from GitHub.