Designing an Interactive Visualization System for Monitoring Participant Compliance in a Large-Scale, Longitudinal Study

TL;DR

This paper presents the design and iterative refinement of an interactive visualization system that enhances monitoring of participant compliance in large-scale, longitudinal studies, facilitating collaboration and data quality assurance.

Contribution

It introduces a novel visualization tool tailored for compliance monitoring, addressing the lack of shared tools and processes in such research contexts.

Findings

The system improves exploratory compliance analysis.

It supports asynchronous collaboration among researchers.

It helps maintain high data quality in longitudinal studies.

Abstract

Frequent monitoring of participant compliance is necessary when conducting large-scale, longitudinal studies to ensure that the collected data is of sufficiently high quality. While the need for achieving high compliance has been underscored and there are discussions on incentives and factors affecting compliance, little is shared about the actual processes and tools used for monitoring compliance in such studies. Monitoring participant compliance with respect to multi-modal data can be a tedious process, especially if there are only a few personnel involved. In this case study, we describe the iterative design of an interactive visualization system we developed for monitoring compliance and refined based on changing requirements in an ongoing study. We find that the visualization system, leveraging the digital medium, both facilitates the exploratory tasks of monitoring participant compliance and supports asynchronous collaboration among non-co-located researchers. Our documented requirements for checking participant compliance as well as the design of the visualization system can help inform the compliance-monitoring process in future studies.