Sharing Heartbeats: Motivations of Citizen Scientists in Times of Crises

TL;DR

This paper investigates the motivations behind citizen scientists sharing health data during COVID-19 crises, emphasizing collective motives and the importance of communication and transparency in digital health tools.

Contribution

It provides new insights into socio-psychological motivations in crisis-driven citizen science, highlighting the dominance of collective motives over egoistic ones.

Findings

Collective motives dominated in app reviews and interviews.

Transparency and communication are crucial for motivating data sharing.

Socio-psychological factors influence citizen participation during crises.

Abstract

With the rise of COVID-19 cases globally, many countries released digital tools to mitigate the effects of the pandemic. In Germany the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) published the Corona-Data-Donation-App, a virtual citizen science (VCS) project, to establish an early warning system for the prediction of potential COVID-19 hotspots using data from wearable devices. While work on motivation for VCS projects in HCI often presents egoistic motives as prevailing, there is little research on such motives in crises situations. In this paper, we explore the socio-psychological processes and motivations to share personal data during a pandemic. Our findings indicate that collective motives dominated among app reviews (n=464) and in in-depth interviews (n=10). We contribute implications for future VCS tools in times of crises that highlight the importance of communication, transparency and responsibility.