Support for saving filled Informed Consent form as required by Institutional Ethics Commitee

Support
1

1. What is the problem? Be very detailed.

As a Public Health Researcher, I get consent from the research participants before administering the interview. I use signature/draw feature to get their signature as consent. However, the consent sheet isn't available in the format approved by the Institutional Ethics Committee (IEC).

Is there a save as PDF (with very few variables + signature) in ODK. The Institutional Ethics Committee and/or the journals ask for Informed Consent Forms collected from the participants. If we use ODK we are left with images of their signatures.

2. What app or server are you using and on what device and operating system? Include version numbers.

I use mobile application ODK v 1.24.1 for data collection.
I use Google Drive as Server.

3. What you have tried to fix the problem?

Nothing! I have no coding knowledge.
If such feature is not available with ODK, is there a way to save as PDF from the data collect in excel or google drive? (Should be an open source solution)

4. What steps can we take to reproduce the problem?

You can please imagine yourself as researcher who gets informed consent form and is liable by the IEC to show the printed consent forms approved by them.

5. Anything else we should know or have? If you have a test form or screenshots or logs, attach below.

If there is no feature available, any other solution for this problem can be please shared. I have more than 1500 participants in my study and I wont be able to copy and paste each person's name + signature in the word document.

I am attaching the sample consent form.
CONSENT FORM FOR PREGNANT WOMEN.pdf (53.2 KB)

I collect the participant's name, address, signature and the date of interview separately via ODK mobile app.

2

Hi @pdineshraj any updates about this request?

3

Hi @Juan_Carlo_Alvarez. Unfortunately, I did not receive any update on this. And I am still looking for a solution.

4

My advice to you would be to use another platform to administer the consent form e.g. Kobotoolbox. You are then able to download individual filled survey forms like the one attached. I hope the downloaded form is close to what you are looking for.
CONSENT FORM FOR PREGNANT WOMEN.pdf (73.7 KB)

I have attached the XLSForm I uploaded to Kobo toolbox to get the survey form administered
consent_form.xlsx (11.7 KB)

5

Google Drive is limited in its functionality so you would need to process the data and build the PDF yourself. You need to be very certain that the resulting PDF looks similar to what was shown to the users and in particular includes exactly the same text. Otherwise you may misrepresent what users signed.

You can build documents from Google Sheets using mail merge. This Google documentation provides clear instructions for a DIY solution. I have used this before and it's great. This plugin may provide more of a plug-and-play solution but I haven't tried it.

@Juan_Carlo_Alvarez can you tell us more about your scenario and needs?

If you are using Central or another server, you can use web forms (Enketo) to print out submissions. In Central, hover over a submission row and click on the edit pencil. You can then print the resulting submission view. I believe you could also automate printing many submissions through the API, let me know if you'd like more instructions on how to do this.

Even if you do have access to web form submissions, you may find advantages to the mail merge approach. You can use Google Docs for that as described above or Excel, Python, etc.

@arqaam described using a web form with Kobotoolbox (an ODK-compatible server) but there's nothing specific to Kobo about this approach. The web form engine (Enketo) is maintained by ODK and embedded in Central.