InSPIRE System: An Activity-Based Platform for Managing and Monitoring Biomedical Research

There is growing need for research enterprises, such as academic medical centers, to measure, monitor, and evaluate the use and impact of institutional resources and services on research activity. To address this need, we have developed a web-based, mobile friendly, open-source system called InSPIRE (Information Sharing Platform for an Integrated Research Environment). We have designed InSPIRE based on activity theory, an established framework for analyzing work practices in terms of technical and social factors. We employed a spiral software development cycle to elicit system requirements based on activity theory, to define use cases, to implement an integrated, flexible architecture, and to validate the ability to capture data on specific research activities. In this work, we present the outcome of our novel design approach, namely an integrated multi-objective system that allows investigators to find and engage a range of research resources (such as cores, funding, and training) and that permits research administrators to track, measure, and assess the use of those resources in real time based on context-based abstraction of the data that is collected.