State-of-the-Art: Current research progress in clinical studies relies on poor participant recruitment mechanisms and unintegrated repositories, and high attrition rates during study performance. There is growing consensus among researchers and policy makers that study compliance of participants can be enhanced by actively involving them to improve satisfaction and motivation, and to reduce attrition rates. Through the active inclusion in scientific studies, study participants themselves stand to become actively engaged in their management of specific dysfunctions, potentially increasing wellbeing and quality of life. Such an approach also enables the development of personalised interventions and facilitates pro-active participation of older adults/patients to optimise physical/social function.

Approach: All beneficiaries will use the same internet-based database for data collection. For this purpose project 12 is dedicated to implement the participant-controlled medical record system Patients Know Best  at all local sites. During and after this implementation phase, it will test feasibility, acceptability and motivational aspects of the system among both, study participants and researchers within the network. A particular focus will be on evaluating attrition rates in training studies and the definition of factors that improve motivation for active involvement in such interventions. A further task of the project will be the design of new motivational features for study participants to the system, such as a medication interaction assessment tool.