MatomoCamp 2021

A practical and accessible session delivered by Dr Katie Newby (Associate Professor, University of Hertfordshire) and Ronan Chardonneau (Associate Professor at IAE Angers and consultant) in which they will talk about how they have worked together to solve a research-related problem using Matomo; how to collect individual-level analytics data on participants engagement with intervention content.
In order to test the efficacy of an intervention, be it a new drug, healthcare product, or service, the gold standard approach is to conduct a randomised controlled trial. This involves randomly allocating participants to receive the intervention being tested or an alternative e.g. placebo. Data to measure the targeted outcome (e.g. improvement in health, wellbeing) is collected at baseline and then also at follow-up timepoints. In a clinical context, the ‘dose’ of the intervention is easily captured (e.g. one blue pill per day) but what if the intervention is delivered through web content? How do we know ‘how much’ of the intervention each participant receives? This is important; if at the end of the trial there is no difference in the outcome of interest between the
groups, without measuring dose how will we know if this because the intervention didn’t work or because it wasn’t used or used enough? We have designed a trial to test the efficacy of an intervention called Wrapped, a website targeting condom use. Our trial will be conducted online using the data capture and management platform REDCap. In this talk we will explain how we have set up Matomo to capture participants’ engagement with the intervention material so that we can measure dose. This has required us to work out how to pass participants’ unique research IDs from
REDCap through to Wrapped, and to capture and report individual-level data in Matomo. We are currently testing the set-up and will present early engagement data available.