Northeastern Orientation vs Beiwe2

Welcome full-time undergraduate students enrolled on our Boston campus for the first time in Fall 2026 and Spring 2027.

The Beiwe App is part of the Beiwe Research Platform. Beiwe is an open-source research platform for subjects enrolled in clinical and non-clinical studies. It provides research-quality sensor, participant usage, and survey data in reproducible studies and is intended for research purposes. Only participants who have been invited to join a study, and have been provided with a participant ID and registration password from a Beiwe server, can use this app. The Beiwe Platform is a project of the Onnela Lab at Harvard University, and development is supported by funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health. Usage of this Beiwe app is open to any Beiwe server by providing a URL at participant registration. Only data configured for collection on an enrolled study are recorded by the app. A small amount of additional metadata, such as whether the user has granted the app permission to access the sensors enabled by the study, are collected in order to assist administrators with participant management and study compliance. All data recorded by the app is encrypted, and once saved it cannot be decrypted except by the server hosting the study. Please Note: use of background GPS will cause some battery drain. Careful configuration and testing of this load on devices ranging from the iPhone 8/X generation (2016) up to current models has been reliably measured at only 6-8% over 12 hours for new batteries, with a worst case of 14% on an older model with a heavily degraded battery. Further battery drain will vary based sensor configuration of the study you enroll in, and the active time you spend in the app. (This app may indicate that it connects to Apple's Health app or uses Apple's HealthKit framework. This is due to the use of Apple's ResearchKit framework, which has HealthKit as a dependency. The app does not incorporate Health data.)