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Needs, Preferences, and Challenges of Environmental Health Researchers in Using Sensors: A Content Analysis
ABSTRACT
Background:
Environmental exposures can influence human health in complex ways. It remains difficult for researchers to integrate exposure data, partly due to an unmet need for informatics and metadata tools.
Objective:
The purpose of this study was to understand the needs, preferences, and pain points of environmental health researchers regarding the selection, deployment, and integration of sensors for their research studies, to inform user requirements for a sensor metadata repository.
Methods:
We purposively recruited six exposure health researchers with expertise entailing sensors, corresponding to one of eight role types, and conducted semi-structured interviews between February 7-26, 2025. Interviews centered on understanding the needs, preferences, and pain points of environmental health researchers seeking to use sensors for their research projects. We conducted deductive content analysis of interview transcripts, guided by the HITREF framework.
Results:
The participants held primary roles of primary investigator, study coordinator, sensor developer, biomedical informaticist, and study sponsor. Content analysis revealed that participants consider multiple characteristics of sensors when selecting sensors for studies, including cost, physical parameters and limitations of the sensors, reliability, suitable environments for deployment, and software and processes required for data acquisition, transfer, integration, and analysis. User training and interaction are important considerations, often conceptualized as burdens on study participants that research teams seek to minimize. Participants described a desire for adequate support from sensor developers and flexibility in data transfer and analysis.
Conclusions:
Participants in varied roles described many similar themes regarding considerations for sensor selection, deployment, and integration as well as desired features for a sensor metadata repository.
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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.