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Willingness to Share Wearable Device Data for Research Among Mechanical Turk Workers: Web-Based Survey Study
Casey Overby Taylor1,2, Natalie Flaks-Manov2,3, Shankar Ramesh4
1Departments of Medicine and Biomedical Engineering, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, United States.
Journal of Medical Internet Research
|October 21, 2021
Summary
Most wearable device users are willing to share their health data for research. Factors like longer device use, higher income, and nationality influence data sharing willingness, with compensation being a key motivator for some.
Area of Science:
- Digital Health
- Biomedical Research
- Data Science
Background:
- Wearable devices offer scalable data collection for research and clinical trials.
- Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) can recruit diverse participants for wearable device studies.
Purpose of the Study:
- To identify characteristics of MTurk users willing to share wearable device data for research.
- To determine if compensation influences willingness to share wearable device data.
Main Methods:
- Secondary analysis of a cross-sectional survey of MTurk workers using wearable devices.
- Logistic regression and decision tree analyses were used to identify influencing factors.
- A 19-question web-based survey was administered to 935 participants.
Main Results:
- 65.8% of participants were willing to share wearable device data.
- Indian nationality, higher income, longer device use (>6 months), and specific device types (heartbeat/pulse tracking) were associated with willingness to share.
- 84.2% of those willing to share would do so if compensated; Indian nationality was linked to less frequent compensation expectation.
Conclusions:
- A majority of wearable device users on MTurk are willing to share data for research.
- Duration of use, nationality, and income are key predictors of data sharing willingness.
- Nationality influences the expectation of compensation for data sharing.
