Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Formative Research
Date Submitted: May 10, 2018
Open Peer Review Period: May 14, 2018 - Jul 9, 2018
Date Accepted: Aug 27, 2018
Date Submitted to PubMed: Jan 26, 2019
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Web-Delivered Multimedia Training Materials for the Self-Collection of Dried Blood Spots: A Formative Project
Background:
The use of dried blood spots (DBS) in biomedical research has been increasing as an objective measure for variables that are typically plagued by self-report, such as smoking status and medication adherence. The development of training materials for the self-collection of DBS that can be delivered through the Web would allow for broader use of this methodology.
Objective:
The objective of this study was to evaluate the acceptability and feasibility of the self-collection of DBS using newly developed multimedia training materials that were delivered through the Web. We also aimed to assess the usability of the collected DBS samples.
Methods:
We recruited participants through Facebook advertising for two distinct studies. The first study evaluated the acceptability of our newly developed DBS training materials, while the second assessed the implementation of this protocol into a larger Web-based study.
Results:
In the first study, participants (N=115) were aged, on average, 26.1 (SD 6.4) years. Training materials were acceptable (113/115, 98.2%, of participants were willing to collect DBS again) and produced usable samples (110/115, 95.7%, collected DBS were usable). In the second study, response rate was 25.0% (41/164), with responders being significantly younger than nonresponders (20.3 [SD 0.2] vs 22.0 [SD 0.4]; P<.001), and 92% (31/41) of collected DBS samples were usable by the laboratory.
Conclusions:
Overall, while the protocol is acceptable, feasible, and produced usable samples, additional work is needed to improve response rates.
Citation
Per the author's request the PDF is not available.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.