Look! A Healthy Neighborhood: Means to Motivate Participants in Using an App for Monitoring Community Health

Abstract

Participatory data collection relies on the commitment of the participants to report data continuously, which makes providing incentives to people crucial. In this case study, we describe how we designed a web app by using different incentive mechanisms to collect participatory data for monitoring community health. The insights we gathered through evaluating the prototype in focus groups and the lessons we learned about sustaining motivation and interest are discussed in the paper. We expect that these lessons would be useful for other participatory sensing projects that aim for constant and systematic data contribution from a large group of people.