A digitally facilitated citizen-science driven approach accelerates participant recruitment and increases study population diversity.

CONCLUSION: Academic and industry-driven medical research faces substantial challenges in terms of patient involvement, recruitment, relevance and generalisability. Digital studies and stakeholder engagement may have enormous potential for medical research. But many digital studies are based on limited participant information and/or informed consent and unclear data ownership, and are subject to selection bias, confounding and information bias. The Swiss MS Registry serves as an example of a digitally enhanced, citizen-science study that leverages the advantages of both traditional medical research, with its established research methods, and novel societal and technological developments, while mitigating their ethical and legal disadvantages and risks. PMID: 29767828 [PubMed - in process]
Source: Swiss Medical Weekly - Category: General Medicine Authors: Tags: Swiss Med Wkly Source Type: research