Motivating Survey Compliance: Game Play Study 1

Summary

Self-reports, especially for patients with chronic physical or mental diseases, are critical for disease research and drug development. Historically, it has been very difficult to collect self-reported data for long periods of time as it is an unpleasant and inconvenient task. Paper and digital surveys are the traditional way of collecting self-reports and have been around for a long time, but still suffer from lack of adherence despite the best efforts of researchers to remind and motivate individuals to fill them out.

Mobile games, on the other hand, benefit from an enormous amount of human adherence. These video games can be played on a smartphone and have captured the attention of a wide variety of demographics. The investigators have used established game design principles to develop a mobile game to motivate individuals to fill out a daily survey.

The purpose of this study is to determine which method of survey administration (paper, digital survey, or game- motivated survey) leads to the highest adherence rates for daily surveys.

Conditions

• Patient Reported Outcome Measures
• Compliance

Interventions

OTHER

The Guardians: A smartphone game

"The Guardians" is a mix of two popular game genres: idle games (a game that doesn't require constant player input in order to progress in the game, but often progresses exponentially in response to a few user inputs, e.g., Cookie Clicker and Adventure Capitalist) and pet collection games (a game where the player seeks to collect all of the pets in a set, e.g., Pokemon or Neko Atsume). The game gives the player an in-game reward for completing a survey.

OTHER

Paper Survey

Paper version of daily survey

OTHER

Electronic Survey

Electronic version of daily survey administered via a smartphone app.

Sponsors & Collaborators

• Millennium Pharmaceuticals, Inc.

  collaborator INDUSTRY

• Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

• Rosalind W Picard, ScD · Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Study Design

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Purpose

SUPPORTIVE_CARE

Masking

NONE

Model

PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age

6 Years

Max Age

24 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

Yes

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2017-10-09

Primary Completion

2017-11-11

Completion

2018-01-11

Countries

• United States

Study Locations