ABSTRACT
Lung cancer is a leading cause of cancer death in Canada, and accurate, early diagnosis are critical to improving clinical outcomes. Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based imaging analytics are a promising healthcare innovation that aim to improve the accuracy and efficiency of lung cancer diagnosis. Maximizing their clinical potential while mitigating their risks and limitations will require focused leadership informed by interdisciplinary expertise and system-wide insight. We convened a knowledge exchange workshop with diverse Saskatchewan health system leaders and stakeholders to explore issues surrounding the use of AI in diagnostic imaging for lung cancer, including implementation opportunities, challenges, and priorities. This technology is anticipated to improve patient outcomes, reduce unnecessary healthcare spending, and increase knowledge. However, health system leaders must also address the needs for robust data, financial investment, effective communication and collaboration between healthcare sectors, privacy and data protections, and continued interdisciplinary research to achieve this technology's potential benefits.
Subject(s)
Artificial Intelligence , Lung Neoplasms , Delivery of Health Care , Humans , Leadership , Lung Neoplasms/diagnostic imaging , SaskatchewanABSTRACT
BACKGROUND: Physical inactivity is the fourth leading cause of death worldwide, costing approximately US $67.5 billion per year to health care systems. To curb the physical inactivity pandemic, it is time to move beyond traditional approaches and engage citizens by repurposing sedentary behavior (SB)-enabling ubiquitous tools (eg, smartphones). OBJECTIVE: The primary objective of the Saskatchewan, let's move and map our activity (SMART) Study was to develop a mobile and citizen science methodological platform for active living surveillance, knowledge translation, and policy interventions. This methodology paper enumerates the SMART Study platform's conceptualization, design, implementation, data collection procedures, analytical strategies, and potential for informing policy interventions. METHODS: This longitudinal investigation was designed to engage participants (ie, citizen scientists) in Regina and Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada, in four different seasons across 3 years. In spring 2017, pilot data collection was conducted, where 317 adult citizen scientists (≥18 years) were recruited in person and online. Citizen scientists used a custom-built smartphone app, Ethica (Ethica Data Services Inc), for 8 consecutive days to provide a complex series of objective and subjective data. Citizen scientists answered a succession of validated surveys that were assigned different smartphone triggering mechanisms (eg, user-triggered and schedule-triggered). The validated surveys captured physical activity (PA), SB, motivation, perception of outdoor and indoor environment, and eudaimonic well-being. Ecological momentary assessments were employed on each day to capture not only PA but also physical and social contexts along with barriers and facilitators of PA, as relayed by citizen scientists using geo-coded pictures and audio files. To obtain a comprehensive objective picture of participant location, motion, and compliance, 6 types of sensor-based (eg, global positioning system and accelerometer) data were surveilled for 8 days. Initial descriptive analyses were conducted using geo-coded photographs and audio files. RESULTS: Pictures and audio files (ie, community voices) showed that the barriers and facilitators of active living included intrinsic or extrinsic motivations, social contexts, and outdoor or indoor environment, with pets and favorable urban design featuring as the predominant facilitators, and work-related screen time proving to be the primary barrier. CONCLUSIONS: The preliminary pilot results show the flexibility of the SMART Study surveillance platform in identifying and addressing limitations based on empirical evidence. The results also show the successful implementation of a platform that engages participants to catalyze policy interventions. Although SMART Study is currently geared toward surveillance, using the same platform, active living interventions could be remotely implemented. SMART Study is the first mobile, citizen science surveillance platform utilizing a rigorous, longitudinal, and mixed-methods investigation to temporally capture behavioral data for knowledge translation and policy interventions.
ABSTRACT
Citizen science initiatives encourage volunteer participants to collect and interpret data and contribute to formal scientific projects. The growth of virtual citizen science (VCS), facilitated through websites and mobile applications since the mid-2000s, has been driven by a combination of software innovations and mobile technologies, growing scientific data flows without commensurate increases in resources to handle them, and the desire of internet-connected participants to contribute to collective outputs. However, the increasing availability of internet-based activities requires individual VCS projects to compete for the attention of volunteers and promote their long-term retention. We examined program and platform design principles that might allow VCS initiatives to compete more effectively for volunteers, increase productivity of project participants, and retain contributors over time. We surveyed key personnel engaged in managing a sample of VCS projects to identify the principles and practices they pursued for these purposes and led a team in a heuristic evaluation of volunteer engagement, website or application usability, and participant retention. We received 40 completed survey responses (33% response rate) and completed a heuristic evaluation of 20 VCS program sites. The majority of the VCS programs focused on scientific outcomes, whereas the educational and social benefits of program participation, variables that are consistently ranked as important for volunteer engagement and retention, were incidental. Evaluators indicated usability, across most of the VCS program sites, was higher and less variable than the ratings for participant engagement and retention. In the context of growing competition for the attention of internet volunteers, increased attention to the motivations of virtual citizen scientists may help VCS programs sustain the necessary engagement and retention of their volunteers.
