Repository of European/international communication technologies (including social media) used in population-based cohorts, patients' cohorts, clinical trials, and exposure cohorts ordered by region

This report contains a concise description of the online repository of European/international technologies used in population cohorts, patients’ cohorts and clinical trials oriented by region (Deliverable 4.2).

The document contains the following information:

1. Description of methodology of mapping population cohorts, patients’ cohorts and clinical trials using social media and new communication technologies as well as overall structure and content of the repository.
2. An overview of the public repository of European/international technologies used in population cohorts, patients’ cohorts and clinical trials.
3. Conclusion drawn from the search of the repository including analysis by region, type of study and type of new communication technologies.

Most of the studies that use new communication technologies were conducted in US (69 studies) and in Europe (47 studies). Mobile data collection was the technology most frequently used in the studies (in 119 studies) of which smartphones and/or smart apps were used in 112 studies and mobile phones in 42 studies. Nineteen studies used social media for data collection and among them Facebook and/or Twitter was the most popular. Geospatial technology was used in 30 studies (with GPS and remote sensing used in most of the studies) and smart sensors in 9 studies (including 5 studies using ingestible sensors). There were no studies using artificial intelligence, crowdsourcing and crowd seeding techniques or passive data collection.

The information collected under WP4 (task 4.2) will be presented during the 32nd Annual Conference of the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology (August 24-27, 2020) – the presentation title: “New communication and data collection technologies used in population and patient cohorts”.