Journal Article

A randomized community trial to advance digital epidemiological and mHealth citizen scientist compliance: A smart platform study

Hammami, Nour, Chu, Luan Manh, Katapally, Tarun Reddy

2021

Overview

This study aims to understand how participants' compliance and response rates to both traditional validated surveys and ecological momentary assessments (EMAs) vary across 4 cohorts who participated in the same mHealth study and received the same surveys and EMAs on their smartphones, however with cohort-specific time-triggers that differed across the 4 cohorts. As part of the Smart Platform, adult citizen scientists residing in Regina and Saskatoon, Canada, were randomly assigned to 4 cohorts in 2018. Citizen Scientists provided a complex series of subjective and objective data during 8 consecutive days using a custom-built smartphone application. All citizen scientists responded to both validated surveys and EMAs that captured physical activity. However, using Smart Platform, we varied the burden of responding to validated surveys and EMAs across cohorts by using different time-triggered push notifications. Participants in Cohort 1 (n = 10) received the full baseline 209-item validated survey on day 1 of the study; whereas participants in cohorts 2 (n = 26), 3 (n = 10), and 4 (n = 25) received the same survey in varied multiple sections over a period of 4 days. We used weighted One-way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) tests and weighted, linear regression models to assess for differences in compliance rate across the cohort groups controlling for age, gender, and household income. Compliance to EMAs that captured prospective physical activity varied across cohorts 1 to 4: 50.0% (95% Confidence Interval [C.I.] = 31.4, 68.6), 63.0% (95% C.I. = 50.7, 75.2), 37.5% (95% C.I. = 18.9, 56.1), and 61.2% (95% C.I. = 47.4, 75.0), respectively. The highest completion rate of physical activity validated surveys was observed in Cohort 4 (mean = 97.9%, 95% C.I. = 95.5, 100.0). This was also true after controlling for age, gender, and household income. The regression analyses showed that citizen scientists in Cohorts 2, 3, and 4 had significantly higher compliance with completing the physical activity validated surveys relative to citizen scientists in cohort group 1 who completed the full survey on the first day. The findings show that maximizing the compliance rates of research participants for digital epidemiological and mHealth studies requires a balance between rigour of data collection, minimization of survey burden, and adjustment of time- and user-triggered notifications based on citizen or patient input.

• Publisher: Public Library of Science,Public Library of Science (PLoS)
• Subject: Adult / Behavior / Biology and Life Sciences / Canada / Citizen Science - methods / Cohort Studies / Compliance / Computer and Information Sciences / Confidence intervals / Data collection / Ecological Momentary Assessment / Engineering and Technology / Epidemiology / Evaluation / Exercise / Female / Gender / Humans / Income / Male / Measurement techniques / Medical care / Medicine and Health Sciences / Middle Aged / Mobile Applications / Optimization / People and Places / Physical activity / Physical fitness / Polls & surveys / Public health administration / Public policy / Quality management / Questionnaires / Regression analysis / Regression models / Research and Analysis Methods / Science Policy / Scientists / Screen time / Sedentary behavior / Smartphone / Smartphones / Social networks / Social Sciences / Statistical analysis / Students / Surveys / Surveys and Questionnaires / Telemedicine / Variance analysis