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%.