The patient's phone as an app: without the internet and with notifications

The home screen without a store, questionnaires answered without the internet and sent later, encrypted, the notifications and the push services.

The personal ePRO link works on the patient's phone like an app: it goes on the home screen without an app store, opens the questionnaires without the internet, and the answers are sent by themselves when the connection is back. If the patient wishes, the phone gets notifications about new questionnaires.

The app on the home screen

On their page the patient sees the block The app on this phone. On Android the button Add to the home screen places an icon like any app; on an iPhone a hint leads through Share → Add to Home Screen in Safari. Nothing is downloaded from a store. On the phone's screen the icon is called “Questionnaires”, with no study or disease name: someone who picks up the phone does not learn which study the patient takes part in. Signing in is still with the PIN.

The block The app on this phone: home screen, work without the internet and notifications — The block on the patient's page: questionnaires kept on the phone, notifications can be switched on.

Working without the internet

When the patient ticks This phone is only mine, the phone keeps the empty questionnaires that are open now or open within the next 7 days, together with the form's checks. Without the internet the patient opens the app, sees the list, answers one question per screen and taps Send to my doctor. The answers stay on the phone and go to the server by themselves as soon as there is a connection. A questionnaire that has not opened yet shows the day and hour it opens and becomes available on time, also without the internet. If the connection drops while an ordinary questionnaire is being sent, the answers are not lost either: they are kept and sent later. Questionnaires with files or photos work only with the internet.

Which answers the server accepts later

Each copy of a questionnaire carries a ticket signed by the server: the patient, the questionnaire and when the copy was made. The server accepts an answer only if the time of filling by the phone's clock is within the questionnaire's window and its hours, not before the copy was made, not in the future, and the answer arrives within 7 days. A new link issued by the site makes old tickets void. An answer to a questionnaire already sent is kept once. The checks are the same as online. If the server does not accept an answer, the patient sees “Not accepted by the server… Tell your doctor”.

What the site sees

In the form's record, next to the time received, it says “filled in without the internet” with the time of filling by the phone's clock. So both when the patient answered and when the answer arrived are visible, as ALCOA+ (contemporaneous records) needs. The gap between the phone's clock and the server is not shown for such answers, because the delay here means no connection, not a wrong clock. The patient card shows on how many phones notifications are on.

Data safety on the phone

Answers waiting to be sent are encrypted with the server's key (ECDH P-256 and AES-GCM) the moment they are saved: nobody can read them on the phone, not even its owner, and only this server can decrypt them. The kept copies hold no earlier answers of the patient, only the questions. Sign out deletes the copies from the phone but never the unsent answers. Copies are kept only on a phone the patient called their own; this mode is not for a shared phone or the site's tablet.

Without the internet: the copy, the answer saved on the phone waiting to be sent — Without the internet: the answer is saved on the phone and will be sent when the connection is back.

Notifications on the phone

The patient switches notifications on themselves on their page after the PIN, with their agreement. They come at the same moments as the letters: when a questionnaire opens and on its last day, between 09:00 and 21:00. A notification is empty: the server sends only a signal, no text and no data, and the phone shows a fixed neutral phrase, “A questionnaire is waiting for you”. It names neither the study nor the questionnaire nor any answer. The site can switch notifications off on all the patient's phones in the patient card; a new link (for example, after a lost phone) switches them off by itself. Notifications work in Chrome and other Android browsers, in Firefox, and on an iPhone (iOS 16.4 or newer) only after adding to the home screen.

Notification services and the law

The delivery service is chosen by the phone's browser, not by YouEDC: Google (FCM) for Chrome and most Android browsers, Apple for the iPhone, Mozilla for Firefox. There is no other way to deliver a notification to a web page; Russia's RuStore Push works only for apps from a store. We pass no personal data to these services: the signal is empty and the subscription address is made by the browser and not linked to a person. The service only sees that the browser got a signal from our server. This is why the function is off by default: the Portal Owner switches it on in Functions and limits once the installation's lawyer agrees. As of October 2026 Russia has no ban on web notifications through these services, but they are foreign and may fail when mobile connections are restricted; e-mail reminders and work without the internet do not depend on them.