Harnessing the computing power of ordinary citizens around the world could have the potential to accelerate the pace of health care research of all kinds, say a team of researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. They say that “crowdsourcing,” which allows investigators to engage thousands of people to provide either data or data analysis via online communications, could even improve research quality and lower its cost.
The team's findings suggest that standardized guidelines for health care crowdsourcing ventures are needed so that data can be collected, reported, and replicated most efficiently. They utilized crowdsourcing in a recent study to locate and catalog the locations of lifesaving automated external defibrillators (AEDs) throughout Philadelphia in the MyHeartMap Challenge. Their study led to the identification of more than 1,400 AEDs in public places, and they hope to replicate the study in other major cities across the US.
In addition to a traditional database search, the team employed crowdsourcing again to perform a literature search for health and medical research articles using two free websites: Yahoo! Answers and Quora. Through this approach, they were able to collect and analyze 21 health-related studies that include crowdsourcing techniques. The studies collectively engaged a crowd of over 136,000 people, ranging in focus from tracking H1N1 influenza outbreaks in near real-time to classifying different types of polyps in the colon.
They found that the studies centered around four main categories of tasks: problem solving, data processing, surveillance/monitoring and surveying. But, there was considerable variability in the amount and type of data reported about the crowd and the experimental set up, which, they say, would make it difficult for other researchers to replicate or model their work for their own research.
