SURVEY ON HEALTH DEVICE USE BY MTURK PARTICIPANTS

Abstract

Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is a crowd-sourcing platform provided by Amazon that helps in the distribution of micro-tasks among a user-base of thousands of registered participants. It has attracted many researchers due to its low cost and fast response time, and many task-participants due to easy and quick cash, and anonymity. Researchers have started using MTurk to implement innovative ideas for collecting datasets. One potential use of MTurk is to recruit participants in research involving the collection of health monitoring data. Little is known about the demographics of MTurk users who collect health monitoring data and their willingness to provide those data for research purposes. In this study, we aim to characterize the demographics and willingness of MTurk users to share data from health monitoring technologies for research. Findings from this work enable researchers to assess the appropriateness of MTurk as a source to recruit individuals willing to share personal health monitoring data.