“This research highlights how citizen-science experiments can collect large datasets on real-world populations to address long-standing health questions.”

         ---- From the publication Dixon et al. (2019) "How the weather affects the pain of citizen scientists using a smartphone app"

Q1: How was this study born?

A: In addition to being an academic, Professor Will Dixon is also a clinical practitioner who sees patients regularly. He heard a lot from his patients about their pain and the weather. But it’s not easy for patients to clearly recall their daily pain levels since their last appointment unless they keep a pain journal. Doctors need this information to offer treatment options for their patients.  Therefore, the idea of a digital journal that they could keep on their smartphones was born.  As long as we were doing that, we could also look at the weather–pain association.  Will had the connections to uMotif, who developed the app and managed the data collection for us.  After that, it was about recruiting patients.

Q2: It has been a very successful project with over 13,000 people downloading the app and over 10,000 contributing some data.  How did you do it?

A: There were several factors. First, we had a very good underlying question, and it’s relatable to many people’s lives. So, we had many volunteers who were eager to see the results. Second, the media helped, as well. The BBC had a television show called “Trust Me I’m a Doctor”, and it interviewed Will and his research group in one episode.  Then, we were lucky to have Will appear on a high-exposure breakfast-time television programme “BBC Breakfast”, which helped us promote the project and led to soaring downloads of the app.

Q3: How did you engage with the public and participants?

A: All participants received a daily notification as a reminder to record their symptoms at 6:24 PM, a time we designed to be at the end of the day around dinner time so that people were still awake, but not at the top of the hour when they might be just starting a television show or other activity. We also ran a newsletter and had a blog to communicate with people and to keep them engaged in the community of participants. We used the blog to introduce the research team, share personal stories from participants, provide resources for the community, and show them the value of their contributions. It’s usually a long process from collecting information to having outputs, and we communicated regularly with our citizen scientists to keep them engaged with the project.

Q4: What were your results?

It took a while to analyze the results, but eventually we did conclude that there was a statistically significant association between weather and pain among the participants in our citizen-science project.  The most robust results were that low pressure over the UK (and its accompanying weather) was more likely to be associated with pain events in our citizen scientists and that high pressure over the UK was less likely to be associated with pain events. This result is consistent with the conditions that many people say are associated with their pain events.

Q5: What did people think about these research results once promoted in the media, and how was it different from previous ones?

A: There were two kinds of feedback. One group was very supportive of us and were happy that some group would finally tackle this problem.  The other group saw our work as a waste of time because “we all knew this already”. Instead of being discouraged by the comments, we went beyond the noise and took it as part of the problem we were trying to solve.  Our study went beyond the previous results because it was the largest study to date, which ensured that our results were statistically significant, as well as meaningful for our participants.

Q6: What’s next?

A: We are using the data we collected during Cloudy With a Chance of Pain and looking into building a pain forecasting tool. This tool would use more than just the weather, which is only a secondary effect on people’s pain, when compared to the amount of physical activity, their mood, or how well they slept. Thus, we hope such a tool would allow more people to be able to plan their activities around their forecasted pain levels, of which the weather would be just one component.