Methods
To gauge their interest in the use of a wearable maternal-fetal ECG device, we used the SurveyMonkey Audience system, from July 31st to August 1st of 2019, to survey 507 female participants across the United States of the ages 18-45, with annual income brackets of $0-$200,000.
SurveyMonkey is an online survey tool used to collect data from individuals across the US population. A pool of over two million people is maintained through an agreement wherein participants agree to take part in a survey, in exchange for SurveyMonkey making a donation of $0.50 to the charity of that individual’s choice. The SurveyMonkey algorithm then randomly assigns participants to surveys in a manner that creates a sample representative of the demographics specified by the investigator. Participants then receive a URL via email from which the survey can be completed on a laptop or mobile device.
This study was conducted under the parameters of a nationally representative sample containing 500 females ranging 18-45 years of age with an annual income range of $0-200,000. Participants were asked a total of 10 questions. We screened the participants by asking upfront: “Are you planning to be pregnant in the next 5 years?” If no, the questionnaire was stopped, if yes, participants answered four questions to gauge interest in a wearable ECG device as seen in Figure 1 . When asked question four, participants were given a description of a wearable device the size of a “patch-sized large band-aid” worn on the abdomen for at least 8 continuous hours throughout the day to help doctors ensure they are doing ok during pregnancy when on the go. Demographics were then gathered via five additional questions to identify income, age, location, gender, polling device type distribution among the cohort.
To achieve adequate power to accurately represent the roughly 60 million US females between the ages of 18-45, we determined 500 participants were needed. In order to gather enough responses for each of the ten questions, SurveyMonkey recruited a total of 527 participants. The response rate among recruited individuals was 96%, with twenty recruited individuals failing to complete all ten questions. The initial screening question had a margin of error of 4.44% due to 507 individuals responding “yes” on “planning to become pregnant in the next 5 years”. Questions 2-5 had a margin of error of 6% due to participants choosing not to answer. Questions 6-10 which were used to gather cohort demographics had a margin of 4.4%. In total, the data collected using the SurveyMonkey Audience System had a confidence level of 95%.