Sharing Heartbeats: Motivations of Citizen Scientists in Times of Crises
It addresses the problem of understanding user motivations for crisis-related citizen science tools, which is incremental research building on existing HCI work.
The study investigated motivations for sharing personal data via a citizen science app during the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany, finding that collective motives were dominant among app reviews and interviews.
With the rise of COVID-19 cases globally, many countries released digital tools to mitigate the effects of the pandemic. In Germany the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) published the Corona-Data-Donation-App, a virtual citizen science (VCS) project, to establish an early warning system for the prediction of potential COVID-19 hotspots using data from wearable devices. While work on motivation for VCS projects in HCI often presents egoistic motives as prevailing, there is little research on such motives in crises situations. In this paper, we explore the socio-psychological processes and motivations to share personal data during a pandemic. Our findings indicate that collective motives dominated among app reviews (n=464) and in in-depth interviews (n=10). We contribute implications for future VCS tools in times of crises that highlight the importance of communication, transparency and responsibility.