Recruitment: Citizen science (Milestone 12.F)
Develop and deploy citizen science methods to engage diverse and underrepresented populations including the full spectrum of age, race/ethnicity, and technological sophistication/access in optimizing approaches to disease monitoring and data sharing.
Support projects that use citizen science to accelerate collection of various types of quantitative and qualitative patient relevant data and data analyses.
Success Criteria
- Launch at least three citizen science projects that use existing or develop new crowd-powered medical research platforms for collection and/or analysis of patient-relevant data. These projects should engage study participants across diverse and under-represented populations in developing and optimizing the study design.
Summary of Key Accomplishments
An NIA-supported project, the Neuropathologic Landscape of Alzheimer's Disease in Hispanic Decedents, aims to examine the neuropathologic characteristics of Hispanics compared to non-Hispanic whites and determine if these characteristics are altered by clinical, genetic, and demographic variables. To achieve these goals efficiently and accurately the research team will use a citizen science approach by leveraging the skills of non-experts from the general public. This will support the rapid gathering of high-volume datasets needed to enable a machine learning method. If these studies are successful, an online platform incorporating this analytic pipeline will be used to execute the first ever analysis of Alzheimer’s histopathology imagery by a crowd of volunteers (geared towards those of Hispanic heritage).
The key accomplishments summary is current as of March 2022.
- Research Implementation Area
- Recruitment and Citizen Engagement
- Timeline
- 2016–2025
- Status
- In Progress