Product Updates
Remind participants with push notifications
Make life easier for you and your participants with automatic reminders.
Happy New Year from the team at Teamscope! 🎉
With the start of 2021, we are very excited to announce the release of Form reminders.
Teamscope started as a solution for researchers to collect data about their patients. Our initial use case was interview-based data collection; in other words, the researchers would ask questions, examine the subject, and then enter that information in a customisable form on our mobile app.
Researchers quickly asked us “can I use Teamscope as an app that my patients can use themselves to collect self-reported data?” The answer to those researchers was a definitive “yes”... followed by a quick “but...”.
With the existing Android and iOS apps and our permission management, this has always been possible. However, there was a limitation: participants or patients could not receive automatic reminders of when they should answer a set of questions.
That all changes today! From our web dashboard, you can now assign reminders to any of your forms. When you set a reminder to a form, users within a study get a push notification reminding them to complete a form.
What used to require a good memory of participants or considerable time investment from researchers to remind subjects is now a fully automated process. Push-notifications can now instruct any range of actions at predetermined times and thus promote more and better data.
For who is this new feature?
Reminders play a considerable role in studies where subjects have to enter data about themselves (i.e. self-reported data) at specific moments.
We believe that this feature will be a massive enhancement for researchers working in the following fields:
Patient-reported outcomes
A patient-reported outcome (PRO) is a health outcome directly reported by the patient who experienced it. In contrast to an outcome registered by a nurse or doctor, a PRO is self-reported and usually when the patient returns to their everyday life.
With reminders, you can build an electronic Patient-reported outcome (ePRO) mobile questionnaire and remind your patients to answer it, for example, for 15 days at 08:00 PM.
Experience Sampling Method
The Experience Sampling Method (ESM) is a research procedure for measuring people’s beliefs, feelings and behaviour during their daily lives. This research methodology is characterised by questionnaires that are in-the-moment; in other words, there and then.
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Learn more There is a smarter way to do research.
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Ecological Momentary Assessments
Ecological momentary assessment (EMA) involves conducting repeated sampling of a subjects’ condition and experiences in real-time and in their natural environments. EMA studies are similar to Experience Sampling since they involve capturing subjects data in their daily lives but is characterised by involving psychological data; for example, blood pressure or body temperature.
If online, this data can be immediately visible to the researchers, or if offline, the data is stored locally on the mobile device and uploaded at the next possible moment of internet connection.
Daily diary
Daily diary studies collect qualitative information about a participant’s activities and experiences. Traditionally participants would use pen and paper journals to write down the events that occurred during a day and how they experienced them.
Today pen and paper diaries have been replaced with electronic journals (eDiaries) which provide cleaner data and faster data analysis. Additionally, eDiaries offer the possibility to remind subjects once a day.
Main highlights
1. Different reminder types
Reminders can be rolling and custom. They can also end after a set amount of intervals or never end. More importantly, they are as flexible as you will ever be and very intuitive to set up. To learn more about how to configure reminders, read the following guide.
2. Flexibility for participants
As a study admin, you can assign a set time to remind participants. Yet, participants ultimately control the time at which reminders will appear on their mobile device and can easily adjust the time of each reminder from the mobile app to better fit their schedule.
3. Customisable push notifications
A push notification is a mobile notification that your participants will see on the mobile app when it’s time for them to answer a questionnaire. Push notifications have a title and subject, and you can easily customise its content from the web dashboard and make the message as engaging as possible.
Push notifications that are triggered by a reminder logic work offline, that means that your participants don't need an internet connection to receive reminders.
4. Track pending tasks
Your study participants might be busy at the time they get a reminder or miss it. For this reason, we have added a new screen on our app where your participants can keep track of any pending tasks or forms.
5. Minimising alert fatigue
Push notifications are an easy way to reach participants, but the Peter Parker principle binds them: “With great power comes great responsibility”.
When an alert is triggered too often or is annoying, it can cause alert fatigue. Alert fatigue can lead your participants to become desensitised to reminders, and it can quickly render them useless.
To minimise the risk of alert fatigue, the Teamscope app only sends a notification when an expected form has not been used within that day. This logic allows us to send the least amount of notifications to participants and avoid unnecessary alerts.
What’s next?
To learn how to use reminder checkout our article from our help center or schedule a live demo with our team.
Reminders and push notifications are currently only available on our Android app. The next step is to also implement this on our iOS app.
Another limitation that this first version of reminders has is that all users within a study (admin and participants) can receive notifications. We will be improving this in the coming months by allowing study admins to create groups of users (e.g. participants) and making it possible to configure reminders per group of users.
We look forward to an exciting year with many new functionalities - stayed tuned for new updates!
- The team at Teamscope
Got a feature request? We love to hear from you and get any ideas on what you would like us to work on next or improve.
Diego Menchaca
Diego is the founder and CEO of Teamscope. He started Teamscope from a scribble on a table. It instantly became his passion project and a magical vehicle into the unknown. Diego is originally from Chile and lives in Nijmegen, the Netherlands.