HealthRhythms: Activity and Mood Study
You are being invited to take part in a study. Before you decide whether you would like to participate, it is important for you to understand why the research is being done and what it will involve.
What is the purpose of this study?
Each one of us has an internal clock that controls our daily rhythms. For example, it tells us when to wake up, when to be active, and when to fall asleep. In this study, we have developed a smartphone app that is designed to unobtrusively recognize these daily rhythms. We want to use this information to better understand how day-to-day activity, exercise, and sleep relates to our mood and well-being.
Who can take part in the study?
You can participate if you:
- Are an adult aged 18 or over
- Have been diagnosed with Depression by a medical professional
- Currently reside in the United States
- Can read and understand English
- Own a compatible smartphone (i.e. iOS or Android smartphone)
What should I expect?
During this study, you will be asked to use the HealthRhythms app that has been designed to use information normally collected by your smartphone to make sense of your own personal ‘daily rhythm’. For example:
- Your physical activity. Everyone’s different. Some of us are more active during the day, others at night. Some of us move more during the week, others during the weekend. Some of us spend most of our time indoors and others outdoors. This app is designed to use your smartphone’s sensor data, including the accelerometer, gyroscope, and location data to help us better understand your physical activity patterns.
- Your sleep patterns. Getting enough sleep on a regular basis is good for your well-being. As such, the app will collect information on your sleep timing to get an idea of how much quality sleep you get each day.
- Your screen time. Too much screen time may have negative effects. With this in mind, the app will collect information on the status of your mobile device (if the screen is on or off, locked or unlocked, battery status).
In order for the app to access these data and function properly, you will be asked to grant the app certain permissions and to keep the app open in the background over the course of the study.
In addition to activity tracking, every few days, the app will prompt you to answer questions about your mood and well-being, which should take 2-3 minutes to complete once a week. We will use these data to better understand how daily activity relates to mood and contentment.
You are free to leave the study at any time. Your participation will last 12 weeks.
Is there any compensation for participating?
You will be paid $50 if you complete the 12 weeks of passive data collection and answer all the weekly questionnaires. You will NOT be given partial compensation if you do not complete the study and provide only some of the required data. You will be offered an additional $25 at the end of the study for an optional 30 minute video exit interview.
What are the risks and benefits of participating in this study?
Benefits. There are no direct benefits for taking part in this study. However, at the end of the study, you will receive a copy of your data and will be able to see your data summarized in a summary report of your 90 days of data. This may help you better understand your daily sleep and activity patterns over the course of the study.
This app is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Only qualified health care providers should ever make decisions regarding diagnosis and treatment of any condition, and any care decision should not rely on the data provided by the product during the trial period of this project.
Risks. The risks of this study are minimal. You may feel inconvenienced by the app presence on your phone or by the prompts you receive. Our goal is to keep these interruptions at a level that is not too disruptive.
A potential, but extremely unlikely, risk is a breach of confidentiality. Many steps have been taken by the research team to protect the confidentiality of all data:
- Your data will be used for research purposes only and will never be sold to a third party.
- You are the owner of your data. You can withdraw from the study whenever you choose and can request your data be removed from our servers at any time.
- You will be assigned an ID that will be attached to the data collected by your smartphone.
- All data collected on your smartphone will be encrypted before it is sent to the researchers.
- If you consent to GPS tracking, we will use this information to understand how your activity patterns relate to your well-being. All GPS data will be encrypted. All the data collected in this study will be stored on secure servers using real-time hardware-based encryption and decryption.Access to decrypted GPS data will be strictly limited to members of the research team and stored in a separate location from the rest of your data. You can turn off the location sharing service of your device to stop sharing your device's location information at any time.
Conflicts of Interest
This study is being conducted by HealthRhythms, Inc., the company developing the smartphone app being investigated here. HealthRhythms, Inc. is providing access to the app being used in this study at no cost to you. The researchers conducting this study have financial interests in HealthRhythms Inc.
What if I have questions?
If you have any questions at any time about the study or the procedures, you may contact the HealthRhythms at 857-529-7367 or by email at research_help@healthrhythms.com.
Next steps
Clicking on the “I Agree” button below will take you to your first surveys and indicates that:
- You have read the above information
- You voluntarily agree to participate
- You are 18 years of age or older
- You currently reside in the U.S.
- You can read and understand English