Crowdsourced tDCS Research: Feasible or Fanciful?
Anna Wexler, Roy H. Hamilton · AJOB Neuroscience · 2017
In recent years, there has been an increase in “crowdsourced” health studies, wherein patients and individuals are not merely passive subjects, but rather active participants in driving research (Swan Citation2012, Ranard et al. 2013). Given the existence of a community of individuals who use brain stimulation—particularly transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS)—at home for self-improvement purposes (Jwa Citation2015; Wexler Citation2016), the issue of whether data from such a population could be aggregated and transformed into scientifically credible knowledge has been suggested by several scholars (Davis Citation2016; Treene et al. 2015). The possibility has also been raised by several home tDCS users on the Reddit tDCS forum (www.reddit.com/r/tDCS). However, as of yet, no data aggregation initiative has been undertaken. Here, we argue that although data from the home use tDCS community could in theory be scientifically useful (at least to some extent), in practice there are a number of methodological obstacles that would be difficult to surmount. In particular, we discuss how the control of variability in scientific tDCS studies would be difficult to replicate among home users, and how a “crowdsourced” tDCS study would differ from previous participant-led studies in other domains. We conclude by discussing the ethical issues that would arise if a tDCS data aggregation initiative is undertaken, and how they would vary depending on whether the initiative is driven by a research institution, company, or home users themselves.