Applications of crowdsourcing in health: an overview
Kerri Wazny · Journal of Global Health · 2018
Applications of crowdsourcing in health: an overviewBackground Crowdsourcing is a nascent phenomenon that has grown exponentially since it was coined in 2006.It involves a large group of people solving a problem or completing a task for an individual or, more commonly, for an organisation.While the field of crowdsourcing has developed more quickly in information technology, it has great promise in health applications.This review examines uses of crowdsourcing in global health and health, broadly.Methods Semantic searches were run in Google Scholar for "crowdsourcing," "crowdsourcing and health," and similar terms.996 articles were retrieved and all abstracts were scanned.285 articles related to health.This review provides a narrative overview of the articles identified.Results Eight areas where crowdsourcing has been used in health were identified: diagnosis; surveillance; nutrition; public health and environment; education; genetics; psychology; and, general medicine/other.Many studies reported crowdsourcing being used in a diagnostic or surveillance capacity.Crowdsourcing has been widely used across medical disciplines; however, it is important for future work using crowdsourcing to consider the appropriateness of the crowd being used to ensure the crowd is capable and has the adequate knowledge for the task at hand.Gamification of tasks seems to improve accuracy; other innovative methods of analysis including introducing thresholds and measures of trustworthiness should be considered. ConclusionCrowdsourcing is a new field that has been widely used and is innovative and adaptable.With the exception of surveillance applications that are used in emergency and disaster situations, most uses of crowdsourcing have only been used as pilots.These exceptions demonstrate that it is possible to take crowdsourcing applications to scale.Crowdsourcing has the potential to provide more accessible health care to more communities and individuals rapidly and to lower costs of care. journal of health globalThe term crowdsourcing was coined a decade ago in Howe' s 2006 Wired article and the field of crowdsourcing in academia and industry has since grown exponentially [1][2][3].Despite recent interest in the field, the actual practice of crowdsourcing has been in use for hundreds of years [3][4][5].Some of the early uses of crowdsourcing include Britain' s Longitude Act and Galton' s report of an experiment where 787 people collectively and accurately guessed the weight of an ox [3,6,7].Crowdsourcing refers to a large group of people collectively solving a problem or completing a task for an individual or an organisation.Its definition