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Active and Passive Crowdsourcing in Medical Research

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With the rise of crowdsourcing and the increasing popularity of platforms that allow individuals to collaborate and share information (knowingly or unknowingly), it's important to consider how these tools can be leveraged to advance health and medicine.  Crowdsourcing is used in medical research for clinical data collection, data analysis and clinical trials, as well as to crowdfund biomedical research.  The ‘crowd’, or large numbers of people, can be used to contribute knowledge inputs (and expert inputs in particular) to solve complex problems. Extreme citizen science and  quantified-self  movement would provide valuable data and insights. However, since active participation is limited, passive methods are more commonly used. Passive crowdsourcing refers to the process of collecting data or information from individuals without their explicit knowledge or consent, typically through the use of tracking technologies such as cookies or by analyzing data from social media or search e