Using smartphones for epidemiological research
Everyday technology offer new opportunities for epidemiology. Most people own a smartphone and take it with them everywhere we go. The smartphone’s touch screen and sensors allow us, researchers, to collect unprecedented amounts of self-reported and sensor data. Opportunities enough, but what are the challenges of using everyday technology for epidemiology?
Anna Beukenhorst (Centre of Epidemiology, University of Manchester) will share experiences from Cloudy with a Chance of Pain, a nationwide smartphone study investigating the association between weather and chronic pain. Via the Cloudy smartphone app, participants daily reported their pain, mood and activity levels. In addition, the app collected location data, which then was linked to hourly weather data from the MetOffice.
The project uncovered opportunities and challenges of digital health studies. How do you recruit and engage participants from across the UK? How do you know if they are representative of your population of interest? How do you handle a mobile health data set of this size and complexity: more than 5 million submitted symptoms, but with high missingness, and weather variables that are highly correlated?
Please take note that this session will NOT be live-streamed/recorded.
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