Bring them aboard: rewarding participation in technology-mediated citizen science projects

Citizen science involves the general public in research activities that are conducted in collaboration with professional scientists. In these projects, citizens voluntarily contribute to the research aims set forward by the scientists through the collection and analysis of large datasets, without a preliminary technical background required. While advancements in information technology have facilitated the involvement of the general public in citizen science through online platforms, several projects still fail due to limited participation. This paper investigates the feasibility of using selected reward mechanisms to positively influence participation and motivations to contribute in a technology-mediated citizen science project. More specifically, we report the results of an empirical study on the effects of monetary and public online acknowledgement rewards. Survey indices and electroencephalographic measurements are synergistically integrated to offer a comprehensive basis for the analysis of citizens' motivations. Our results suggest that both reward mechanisms could crowd-in participants in technology-mediated citizen science projects. With this study, we seek to lay the foundations for a private-collective research model, where the focus is the intensification of participation in technology-mediated citizen science projects

Activating social strategies: Face-to-face interaction in technology-mediated citizen science

The use of crowds in research activities by public and private organizations is growing under different forms. Citizen science is a popular means of engaging the general public in research activities led by professional scientists. By involving a large number of amateur scientists, citizen science enables distributed data collection and analysis on a scale that would be otherwise difficult and costly to achieve. While advancements in information technology in the past few decades have fostered the growth of citizen science through online participation, several projects continue to fail due to limited participation. Such web-based projects may isolate the citizen scientists from the researchers. By adopting the perspective of social strategy, we investigate within a measure-manipulate-measure experiment if motivations to participate in a citizen science project can be positively influenced by a face-to-face interaction with the scientists leading the project. Such an interaction provides the participants with the possibility of asking questions on the spot and obtaining a detailed explanation of the citizen science project, its scientific merit, and environmental relevance. Social and cultural factors that moderate the effect brought about by face-to-face interactions on the motivations are also dissected and analyzed. Our findings provide an exploratory insight into a means for motivating crowds to participate in online environmental monitoring projects, also offering possible selection criteria of target audience

Increasing patient engagement in rehabilitation exercises using computer-based citizen science

Patient motivation is an important factor to consider when developing rehabilitation programs. Here, we explore the effectiveness of active participation in web-based citizen science activities as a means of increasing participant engagement in rehabilitation exercises, through the use of a low-cost haptic joystick interfaced with a laptop computer. Using the joystick, patients navigate a virtual environment representing the site of a citizen science project situated in a polluted canal. Participants are tasked with following a path on a laptop screen representing the canal. The experiment consists of two conditions: in one condition, a citizen science component where participants classify images from the canal is included; and in the other, the citizen science component is absent. Both conditions are tested on a group of young patients undergoing rehabilitation treatments and a group of healthy subjects. A survey administered at the end of both tasks reveals that participants prefer performing the scientific task, and are more likely to choose to repeat it, even at the cost of increasing the time of their rehabilitation exercise. Furthermore, performance indices based on data collected from the joystick indicate significant differences in the trajectories created by patients and healthy subjects, suggesting that the low-cost device can be used in a rehabilitation setting for gauging patient recovery

A Dynamic Parameter Identification Method for Migrating Control Strategies Between Heterogeneous Wheeled Mobile Robots

Recent works on the control of wheeled mobile robots have shifted from the use of the kinematic model to the use of the dynamic model. Since theoretical results typically treat the inputs to the dynamic model as torques, few experimental results have been provided, as torque is typically not the input to most commercially available robots. Few papers have implemented controllers based on the dynamic model, and those that have did not address the issue of identifying the parameters of the dynamic model. This work focuses on a method for identifying the parameters of the dynamic model of a wheeled mobile robot. The method is shown to be both effective and easy to implement, and requires no prior knowledge of what the parameters may be. Experimental results on two mobile robots of different scale demonstrate its effectiveness. The estimates of the parameters created by the proposed method are then used in an adaptive controller to verify their accuracy. For future work, this method should be completed autonomously in a two-part manner, onboard the mobile robot. First, the robot should perform the method proposed here to generate an initial parameter estimate, and then use adaptive control to update the estimates

A model for citizen scientist contribution in an image tagging task

ACitizen science projects are becoming increasingly popular, yet they typically rely on only a small portion of users for the ma- jority of contribution. In this paper, we propose a model for cit- izen scientist contribution in an online image tagging task. The model describes participant contribution in response to the per- formance of a virtual peer, the behavior of which can be con- trolled by the experimenter. Experimental trials where the vir- tual peer behaves independent of the participant are used to cal- ibrate the model. The model's ability to predict participant per- formance is then verified in a closed-loop condition, where the behavior of the virtual peer is explicitly dependant on the perfor- mance of the participant. We foresee this model being a useful tool in the design of web-based citizen science projects, where the behavior of a virtual peer can be used to modulate the per- formance of contributors in an effort to increase overall levels of contribution

Increasing patient engagement in rehabilitation through citizen science

In this paper, we investigate the effects of including scientific tasks on the satisfaction of patients performing rehabilitation exercises. A low-cost system, comprised of a haptic joystick and a laptop computer, is used for patients to interact with a virtual environment. Within the virtual environment, users are presented with and classify images captured by a robot as part of a citizen science project. Results show that higher levels of satisfaction are attained when the exercise includes scientific tasks

Increasing citizen science contribution using a virtual peer

Online participation is becoming an increasingly common means for individuals to contribute to citizen science projects, yet such projects often rely on only a small fraction of participants to make the majority of contributions. Here, we investigate a means for influencing the performance of citizen scientists toward enhancing overall participation. Building on past social comparison research, we pair citizen scientists with a software-based virtual peer in an environmental monitoring project. Through a series of experiments in which virtual peers outperform, underperform, or perform similarly to human participants, we investigate the influence of their presence on citizen science participation. To offer insight into the psychological determinants to the response to this intervention, we propose a new dynamic model describing the bidirectional interaction between humans and virtual peers. Our results demonstrate that participant contribution can be enhanced through the presence of a virtual peer, creating a feedback loop where participants tend to increase or decrease their contribution in response to their peers' performance. By including virtual peers that systematically outperform the participants, we demonstrate a fourfold increase in their contribution to the citizen science project