Sessions

To get an overview of the sessions in your study, go to the Sessions page on Researcher Dashboard, where you can see all the sessions in a calendar-based view. The Sessions page also allows you to create, edit, delete, and download sessions. These will be explained below.

Viewing Sessions

When an Activity is triggered for a participant, Avicenna will create a session. This session will hold information about the triggered Activity, the metadata, and the responses provided by the participants. The Sessions page presents all the sessions in your study in a calendar-based layout. Each session contains a Status that is displayed with a different color.

To view the sessions,

• Open the Sessions page on the Researcher Dashboard.
• Go to the Participants tab from the right-side panel and select the participants whose sessions you want to check. Note that currently, you can choose a maximum of 5 participants.
• Then go to the Activities tab and select your desired Activities.
• Press Apply Filters.

Following this, you can access all the Activity sessions with their status for the selected participants.

You can view the Activity sessions starting when a particular participant joins your study. To do this easily, after selecting a Participant ID under the Participants tab, click on the Go to Join Time button that appears. This is an essential aspect of the calendar since it allows you to check all your study sessions and ensure they are created correctly for all the participants.

As you see in the top left corner, you can also determine the period that you want the sessions to be displayed in. You can select a Daily, Weekly, Monthly, or Yearly view. Also, below the session statuses, you can find a progress bar. As you hover the mouse over it, a tooltip appears that shows the number and percentage of sessions with a particular status. The image below shows that we have 245 Unanswered sessions for the selected participants, accounting for almost 82% of the sessions.

Also, you can hide or show sessions with specific statuses by tapping their status badge above the calendar.

Clicking on each session will give you its metadata which includes Activity, Participant, Scheduled Time, Response Time, and UUID which is a Universal Unique Identifier that uniquely identifies a session in Avicenna.

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Whether you use Avicenna as a researcher or participant, all time values are automatically converted to the user's local time zone, i.e., Avicenna displays all the sessions based on the user's local time zone. Please refer to the Participation Period to learn how Avicenna deals with time.

Let’s work on an example scenario here. Assume that you are interested in viewing all the sessions that were or will be prompted for one of your study's participants (ID: 59982) in March 2023. To see these Activity sessions,

• Choose the Participants and the Activities from the right-side panel.
• Press Apply Filters.
• Then set the view to Month and select March 2023 for the date range.

Now you can see all the sessions scheduled for this participant in March 2023 with their status. Note that if there are more than two sessions in a cell, you will see a More button, which, if clicked on, will show you the list of all sessions in that particular time slot cell.

Downloading Sessions

The Sessions page also lets you download all the sessions defined in your study in a CSV format. To do that, tap the Download as CSV button above the calendar. The downloaded file provides information about the sessions, including the Participant ID, the Activity ID, the Scheduled Time, the Record Time, Status, etc.

Actions on the Sessions Page

You can perform several actions on a session on the Sessions page, including creating, editing, and deleting sessions.

Creating a Session

The Sessions page offers you two ways to create a session. You can tap the Create New Sessions button above the calendar and upload the CSV file of the sessions. The CSV file must include the Participant ID, the Activity ID, and the Scheduled Time in each row.

In addition, you can also click on the whitespace area of the calendar cells for the upcoming days. This will take you to the Create Session dialog, where you can specify the Activity, the Participant, the Scheduled Time, and the Expiry Time. Note that the session that you create this way or using a CSV file will be a Researcher-Defined Session.

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When you create a session in the Create Session dialog, only the selected participants from the right-side panel will be visible in the Participant field. Also, you can create sessions for one participant at a time. However, using the CSV option, you can create multiple sessions for multiple participants and Activities.

Deleting a Session

If you want to delete a session, there are two ways:

1. First, tap the Delete Sessions button above the calendar and enter the UUID of the sessions you want to delete. As you see in the image below, you can only delete the Researcher-Defined sessions here. Also, note that only future sessions can be deleted.

   

2. Second, click on one of the upcoming sessions in the calendar and tap the Delete icon. Doing this opens a dialog where you must confirm that you want to delete the session. Note that here you can delete all the possible session types, including Time TL and Researcher-Defined sessions. The Reload participant’s device box is checked by default to ensure the participants receive the changes. This is optional; you can uncheck it if you see it as unnecessary. You won’t see this option for Researcher-Defined sessions, as Avicenna will automatically reload the devices for such sessions.

   

Editing a Session

In addition to creating or deleting, you can edit a session on the Sessions page. Keep in mind that you can only edit future sessions. To do this,

• Click on an upcoming session in the calendar.
• Then tap the Edit icon.
• You can change the Scheduled Time and Expiry Time in the opened dialog.
• By default, the Reload participant’s device box is checked so the participants whose sessions have been modified can receive the latest changes.

Note that, like deleting a session, you won’t see the Reload participant’s device option for the Researcher-Defined sessions, as Avicenna will automatically update them.