At NeuroUX, we’re constantly striving to improve our products and services. We are happy to share that we have recently completed normative and qualitative data collection of our mobile cognitive tests. Normative data of cognitive tests can help answer key clinical and research questions, such as:

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1. What’s the equitable standard against which performance on tests can be compared and interpreted?
2. What scores are considered normal and what are considered impaired for my patient?
3. What is the test profile associated with a particular illness nosology?
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As part of our effort to collect normative data of our mobile cognitive tests, we partnered with Prolific to recruit and conduct a study with 350 participants in the US. Prolific is a research platform that provides access to 130,000+ vetted participants from the general population across the world.

Approach to Gathering Normative Data:

We took a rigorous approach to our collection of normative data. Criteria for finding a research partner included

  • The ability to recruit a large number of participants who were representative of the US population
  • Ensuring that the participants would be highly motivated and engaged in the study
  • Ensuring that the data collected was of high quality and that the study design was robust enough to yield meaningful results.

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We used Prolific to recruit a nationally representative sample of 350 participants and conduct longitudinal data collection with our mobile cognitive tests. During this study, participants completed a series of cognitive tests and answered ecological momentary assessment (EMA) surveys on their smartphones once per day for 10 consecutive days. The sessions were brief and took around 10 minutes to complete. At the end of 10 days, we sent a feedback survey to collect qualitative data on user experience with the tests.
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We chose Prolific primarily because of the access to a large pool of highly motivated and engaged participants. Prolific made it easy for us to manage our study, monitor participants’ progress, communicate with them in case of any queries, and handle payments. Additionally, their team is very responsive.
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Results:

The experience of using Prolific to gather data on our mobile cognitive tests has been very positive for NeuroUX. We were able to recruit a large number of highly motivated and engaged participants in a very short period of time. The data collected will be useful for future research and clinical purposes, enhancement of our user experience, and product development.
However, we encountered a few challenges:

  • A few data points were missing, which created challenges in analyzing the demographic data. To address this issue, we included additional questions in our feedback survey.
  • Running a longitudinal study is inherently complex. Prolific doesn’t provide a single, consolidated view of different sessions in a longitudinal study. You need to create and treat each session as a different study, which is quite burdensome from an administration and data-tracking perspective.

We conveyed our feedback to Prolific’s team, who assured us they are actively working on these issues.
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NeuroUX is a leading provider of research tools to optimize the assessment of cognition. Our goal is to facilitate large-scale cognitive and psychological data collection by providing our beautifully designed Mobile Cognitive Tests (MCT) and Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) app. Results of the normative study are available upon request, and a peer-reviewed publication is in progress.

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