Three VCU School of Business Information Systems students have developed "Project Linden," an application designed to provide a full service solution to manual data collection. For the past three months Matt Nuckols and Matt Morton, both seniors and Chris Stewart, a junior, have been developing a Tablet PC application using Microsoft's NET technology. Their findings have not only been beneficial to their supporters at the VCU Autism Center of Virginia where they went to partner with the medical and educational staff, but have earned them a trip to a national technology contest.

For observational duties performed by a psychologist working with a patient, the students are replacing the usual wooden clipboard with a Table PC. Using wireless technology and web services, all of the system's components allow the data collected to be synchronized with a central database. Because of the students strong use of web services, there are no geographical restrictions on the system.
The VCU team's system consists of three major components. Clipboard (a data collection application), Form Builder (which allows users to build and implement their own custom forms) and Report Builder (which allows reports to be made from the data collected) These applications are streamlined in such a way that no maintenance is involved, and computer illiteracy isn't a barrier. To make the collected data available to those interested in doing further research, they have exposed the data in a confidential fashion (by removing sensitive patient information) using web services and XML formatting.

What is most exciting about this system, is that it has been designed to be a framework. They have created a set of APIs that anyone can use to build their own extension of the framework. For example, this application can be used with marketing data, research, land surveys, psychiatry and even Microsoft judging tally sheets.

To develop the project the threesome was sponsored by Markel to work with the staff at VCU Autism Center of Virginia to extend observational framework and design an application that can be used for any observational discipline. What this means is that the health and educational personnel now have the immediate benefit at their finger tips of searching a central database where information has been stored and retrieving data from earlier cases that may have similar characteristics. The patient's identification is protected by numeric identifiers, which decreased many confidentiality concerns. All data captured can begin immediately helping with assessments of both the patient's progress and the program being used. In the past assessments were all recorded on paper and not quickly processed.

This month Nuckols, Morton and Stewart and Project Linden competed against 18 teams at the 2004 Imagine Cup Northeast Region held at Princeton University. They finished second which qualified them to go on to the national contest in San Diego, CA in May. There they will compete against eight teams for the championship and the chance to go to the international competition in Brazil. The students are all Information Systems majors, and competed at Princeton against computer science teams from such schools as Carnegie Melon, Columbia, MIT, Cornell, Stony Brook, Fordham and Boston University.

The Autism Center of Virginia was established in 1998 through the philanthropic efforts of Alan Kirshner, Chairman and CEO of Markel, and their partnership with the Department of Psychiatry in the Health Systems Center at VCU.