Development of the TabacoQuest app for computerization of data collection on smoking in psychiatric nursing

OBJECTIVE: to develop a mobile app for research on the use of tobacco among psychiatric patients and the general population. METHOD: applied research with the technological development of an app for data collection on an Android tablet. For its development, we considered three criteria: data security, benefits for participants and optimization of the time of researchers. We performed tests with twenty fictitious participants and a final test with six pilots. RESULTS: the app collects data, stores them in the database of the tablet and export then to an Excel spreadsheet. Resources: calculator, stopwatch, offline operation, branching logic, field validation and automatic tabulation. CONCLUSION: the app prevents human error, increases the quality of the data by validating them during the interview, allows the performing of automatic tabulation and makes the interviews less tiring. Its success may encourage the use of this and other computational resources by nurses as a research tool.