A DISTRIBUTED LEDGER SOLUTION FOR MANAGEMENT OF PSYCHOLOGY TEST DATA

Abstract

Psychology tests are widely used in mental health diagnoses, education assessments, and recruitment assessments. There are several major problems in using the traditional way to manage psychology test data. First, there is no single source of truth for psychology test data due to centralized storage. Second, the data are mutable and have the risk of a single point of failure. Third, people have very weak or no control of their own data. This thesis explores the possibility of adopting the new distributed ledger technology, represented by blockchain, to address the problems. The relevant literature of blockchain and psychology tests was reviewed. A complete academic solution was proposed. It includes a permissioned blockchain, a no-SQL database, a web service, and a front-end. The blockchain stores user profile, metadata of psychology tests, final test scores, and access control data of the tests and test scores. The no-SQL database stores test materials and raw test results. The web service interacts with the blockchain and the no-SQL database. The front-end interacts with the web service. The solution was implemented, and the performance was evaluated. The evaluation results showed that the Post request is slower than the Get request and as the number of clients grows linearly, the latency of the requests grows linearly. The slower latency for the Post request compared to the Get request reflects the time it takes for the blockchain system to write information and change the common ledger status. The solution proposed here provides a new way to manage psychology test data with satisfactory performance. Future research can focus on extending the current solution to other questionnaire data management and to non-questionnaire-based psychology assessment data management.