Human Factors in the Design of Longitudinal Smartphone-based Wellness Surveys

Phone-based surveys are increasingly being used in healthcare settings to collect data from potentially large numbers of subjects, e.g., to evaluate their levels of satisfaction with medical providers, to study behaviors and trends of specific populations, and to track their health and wellness. Often subjects respond to such surveys once, but it has become increasingly important to capture their responses multiple times over an extended period to accurately and quickly detect and track changes. With the help of smartphones, it is now possible to automate such longitudinal data collections, e.g., push notifications can be used to alert a subject whenever a new survey is available. This paper investigates various human factors in the design of a longitudinal smartphone-based data collection that contribute to user compliance and quality of collected data. This work presents the design recommendations based on analysis of data collected from 17 subjects over a one month period.