Crowdsourcing Paper Screening in Systematic Literature Reviews

Literature reviews allow scientists to stand on the shoulders of giants, showing promising directions, summarizing progress, and pointing out existing challenges in research. At the same time conducting a systematic literature review is a laborious and consequently expensive process. In the last decade, there have a few studies on crowdsourcing in literature reviews. This paper explores the feasibility of crowdsourcing for facilitating the literature review process in terms of results, time and effort, as well as to identify which crowdsourcing strategies provide the best results based on the budget available. In particular we focus on the screening phase of the literature review process and we contribute and assess methods for identifying the size of tests, labels required per paper, and classification functions as well as methods to split the crowdsourcing process in phases to improve results. Finally, we present our findings based on experiments run on Crowdflower

Clinical metagenomics.

Clinical metagenomic next-generation sequencing (mNGS), the comprehensive analysis of microbial and host genetic material (DNA and RNA) in samples from patients, is rapidly moving from research to clinical laboratories. This emerging approach is changing how physicians diagnose and treat infectious disease, with applications spanning a wide range of areas, including antimicrobial resistance, the microbiome, human host gene expression (transcriptomics) and oncology. Here, we focus on the challenges of implementing mNGS in the clinical laboratory and address potential solutions for maximizing its impact on patient care and public health

Male Weight Control: Crowdsourcing and an Intervention to Discover More

Men and women have similar rates of obesity but the combined prevalence of overweight and obesity is higher among men. Men who are overweight are a high-risk group for many obesity-related chronic diseases, as they are more likely to carry excess weight in the abdomen, which is generally more harmful than weight stored in the lower body. Men are also less likely than women to perceive themselves as overweight, and thus are less likely to initiate weight loss through organized weight loss programs. On average, less than 27% of weight loss trial participants have been men. Internet-based research is a low-cost, efficient way to produce novel hypotheses related to weight loss that may have previously escaped weight loss professionals. Additionally, incentives are an effective tool to motivate behavior change, and there is ample evidence to support the use of incentives to encourage many health-promoting behaviors, such as weight loss. The purpose our initial study was to facilitate intervention development by using crowdsourcing to detect unexpected beliefs and unpredicted barriers to male weight loss. The aim of our main study was to evaluate the impact of financial incentives to facilitate weight loss in men, delivered as part of a weight loss intervention. Two separate studies were conducted. In the first project, participants were recruited to a crowdsourcing survey website which was used to generate hypotheses for behaviors related to overweight and obesity in men. Participants provided 21,846 responses to 193 questions. While several common themes seen in prior research were revealed such as previous health diagnoses and physical activity participation, other potential weight determinants such as dietary habits, sexual behaviors and self-perception were reported. Crowdsourcing in this context provides a mechanism to further investigate perceptions of weight and weight loss interventions in the male population that have not previously been documented. These insights will help guide future intervention design. For the main project, a randomized trial compared the Gutbusters weight loss program (based on the REFIT program) alone with Gutbusters with escalating incentives for successful weight loss. The six-month intervention was conducted online with weekly in-person weight collections for the first 12 weeks. Gutbusters encouraged participants to make six 100-calorie changes to their daily diet, utilizing a variety of online lessons targeting specific eating behaviors. Measures included demographic information, height, weight, waist circumference, and body fat percentage. Participants (N=102, 47. 0± 12. 3 yrs old, 32. 5 kg/m2, 80. 4% with at least two years of college) were randomized in a 1:1 ratio to Gutbusters or Gutbusters+Incentive. Significantly more Gutbusters+Incentive participants lost at least 5% of their baseline weight compared to the Gutbusters group at both 12 and 24 weeks. Similar to the aforementioned REFIT program, Gutbusters participants were able to achieve clinically significant weight loss. The Gutbusters+Incentive achieved greater rates of weight loss than the Gutbusters alone group, further supporting the value of incentives in promoting health behaviors

Fuzzy Information Enrichment for Self-healing Recommendation Systems of COVID-19 Patient

The global emergency caused by the Covid-19 pandemic does not yet have a registered drug. Many studies suggest strengthening the immune system in the human body as an alternative solution to treating Covid-19 before the discovery of drugs. This study reports on various types of potential treatments and factors associated with the immune response to the virus. The analysis shows that the effectiveness of the treatment depends on the current preferences of the Covid-19 patient. Therefore, this study aims to use crowdsourced fuzzy information enrichment through Self-healing Recommender Systems (ShRS) to provide recommendations for the best treatment therapy. It is hoped that the proper treatment therapy will cure the healing of Covid-19 patients who are self-isolating. To demonstrate the ShRS, an illustrative example was conducted. We used a crowdsourcing approach to generate treatment therapy recommendations in Bojonegoro, an area with a high number of Covid-19 cases in Indonesia. Most contextual input parameters such as age category, physical condition, and nutritional status are fuzzy. Therefore, we perform ShRS in proposing fuzzy inference to compute a new score/rank with each treatment pooled in it. The purpose of this study is to build a more practical recommendation system because the use of website applications and gadgets can open up opportunities for the public to contribute to human care. This study proposes a system to uncover the best options for healing people infected with Covid-19. It can help health practitioners and the general public cope with self-healing during a pandemic as an alternative lifesaver

Contemp Clin Trials

ObjectiveOnline crowdsourcing refers to the process of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people over the Internet. We examined the potential for using online crowdsourcing methods for conducting behavioral health intervention research among people with serious mental illness (SMI).MethodsSystematic review of randomized trials using online crowdsourcing methods for recruitment, intervention delivery, and data collection in people with SMI, including schizophrenia spectrum disorders and mood disorders. Included studies were completed entirely over the Internet without any face-to-face contact between participants and researchers.Databases and sourcesMedline, Cochrane Library, Web of Science, CINAHL, Scopus, PsychINFO, Google Scholar, and reference lists of relevant articles.ResultsWe identified 7 randomized trials that enrolled N=1,214 participants (range: 39 to 419) with SMI. Participants were mostly female (72%) and had mood disorders (94%). Attrition ranged from 14% to 81%. Three studies had attrition rates below 25%. Most interventions were adapted from existing evidence-based programs, and consisted of self-directed education, psychoeducation, self-help, and illness self-management. Six studies collected self-reported mental health symptoms, quality of life, and illness severity. Three studies supported intervention effectiveness and two studies showed improvements in the intervention and comparison conditions over time. Peer support emerged as an important component of several interventions. Overall, studies were of medium to high methodological quality.ConclusionOnline crowdsourcing methods appear feasible for conducting intervention research in people with SMI. Future efforts are needed to improve retention rates, collect objective outcome measures, and reach a broader demographic.R01 MH104555/MH/NIMH NIH HHS/United StatesU48 DP005018/DP/NCCDPHP CDC HHS/United States2017-01-16T00:00:00Z26188164PMC471579

Development of an open source web-based infrastructure for designing medical devices

The term ‘Open Source’ is commonly associated with software due to its proven success, encompassing a user’s ability to review and modify the underlying source code, to disseminate modified or unmodified versions to others, and to use it without facing the prospect of legal repercussions (Siedlok, 2001). In the context of product design, namely medical device design, the concept remains relatively novel with no prior research being reported. A study of applying the open source concept to medical device design by developing a web based infrastructure for its facilitation is reported here. Results: The stakeholder requirements are captured using a semi-structured questionnaire and validated through cross referencing responses to questions with other responses from stakeholders of the same or similar occupation. The most prominent responses are selected as the key stakeholder requirements and utilised in conjunction with the functional system requirements outlined in the System Requirements Specification (SyRS), both sets of requirements provide the foundation for the open source web based infrastructure development. Conclusion: The comprehensiveness of the requirements indicate that the open source web based infrastructure will support the design of all medical devices that are classified as high risk, medium risk or low risk devices, whilst devices external to this scope remain a future certainty