GO-E-MON: A New Online Platform for Decentralized Cognitive Science

Abstract

Advances in web technology and the widespread use of smartphones and PCs have proven that it is possible to optimize various services using personal data, such as location information and search history. While considerations of personal privacy and legal aspects lead to situations where data are monopolized by individual services and companies, a replication crisis has been pointed out for the data of laboratory experiments, which is challenging to solve given the difficulty of data distribution. To ensure distribution of experimental data while guaranteeing security, an online experiment platform can be a game changer. Current online experiment platforms have not yet considered improving data distribution, and it is currently difficult to use the data obtained from one experiment for other purposes. In addition, various devices such as activity meters and consumer-grade electroencephalography meters are emerging, and if a platform that collects data from such devices and tasks online is to be realized, the platform will hold a large amount of sensitive data, making it even more important to ensure security. We propose GO-E-MON, a service that combines an online experimental environment with a distributed personal data store (PDS), and explain how GO-E-MON can realize the reuse of experimental data with the subject’s consent by connecting to a distributed PDS. We report the results of the experiment in a groupwork lecture for university students to verify whether this method works. By building an online experiment environment integrated with a distributed PDS, we present the possibility of integrating multiple experiments performed by different experimenters—with the consent of individual subjects—while solving the security issues.