As posthumous data use policy within the broader scope of navigating postmortem data privacy is a procedurally complex landscape, our study addresses this by exploring patterns in individuals’ willingness to donate data with health researchers after death and developing practical recommendations.

An electronic survey was conducted in April 2021 among adults (≥18 years of age) registered in ResearchMatch (www.researchmatch.org), a national health research registry. Descriptive statistics were used to observe trends in, and multinomial logistic regression analyses were conducted at a 95% confidence interval to determine the association between, willingness to donate some, all, or no data after death with researchers based on the participants’ demographics (education level, age range, duration of using online medical websites, and annual frequency of getting ill).

Of 399 responses, most participants were willing to donate health data (electronic medical record data [67%], prescription history data [63%], genetic data [54%], and fitness tracker data [53%]) after death. Among 397 respondents, we identified that individuals were more likely to donate some data after death (vs. no data) if they had longer duration of using online medical websites (adjusted relative risk ratio = 1.22, p= 0.04, 95% CI: 1.01 to 1.48). No additional significant findings were observed between willingness to donate all, some, or none of their data after death and other demographic factors.

Engaging patients in online medical websites may be one potential mechanism to encourage or inspire individuals to participate in posthumous data donation for health research purposes.

Individuals who play video games on computers and cellphones may have better psychomotor skills. It is unknown whether simulated driving performance varies between individuals who play video games more per week compared to individuals who play less. This study investigates whether initial simulated driving performance differs between high and low gamers during a brief (e.g., 10 minutes) driving simulation.

Data for this study were collected at baseline during enrollment for a randomized clinical trial (n = 40). Participants playing video games for > 10 hours/week were categorized as the high gaming group; others were in the low gaming group. Each participant drove the same simulation on the STISIM M1000 simulator, which recorded various driving performance metrics (e.g., driving out of lane and time to initial collision). Data between the groups were compared using Cox proportional hazards and analysis of covariance regression models.

The average age of participants was 21 ± 2.7 years and 48% were male. After adjusting for age, sex, and miles driven per week, the high gaming group spent a mean 4% less time driving out of lane compared to the low gaming group (β = –4.03, SD = 1.32, p ≤ 0.05). No other differences were observed between groups for any other outcome.

With the exception of percentage time driving out of lane, the number of hours gaming per week does not seem to impact an individual’s initial driving performance on a driving simulator. These findings may inform future driving simulation research methodology.