Ups and Downs — Measuring Meds In-the-Moment

The Challenge

How did a researcher for a pharma company and its physician advisors get participants in a drug study to talk about their feelings while taking a supplemental medication for the treatment of depression?

The Solution

Civicom recommended the use of Civicom ThoughtLight® to record their patient journeys. For a period of three days every month respondents would log in to the ThoughtLight app using their smartphones, and record their feelings, according to a set of criteria supplied by the project sponsors. The study was completed entirely using the ThoughtLight audio recording capability in order to isolate and obtain the value of in-depth sentiment. This was achieved by our turning off respondents’ ability to take photos or videos or send text using the app.

By listening to the audio recordings the researcher and medical team were able to experience the sentiment that went into the feelings expressed. Transcribed recordings, along with the audio links, were posted on the ThoughtLight admin panel for researcher review, where the researchers and project medical team could listen to the thoughts of the respondents and analyze what they had to say and how they expressed it. These results were used to supplement a larger and more complex clinical study that tracked the respondents over an extended period.