Using Animation to Self-Report Health: A Randomized Experiment with Children

Background: The Child Health Utility-9D (CHU-9D) is the only generic preference-based measure specifically developed to elicit health-related quality of life directly from children aged 7–11 years. The aim of this study was to investigate whether the use of animation on a touch screen device (tablet) is a better way of collecting health status information from children aged 4–14 years compared to a traditional paper questionnaire. The specific research questions were firstly, do young children (4–7 years) find an animated questionnaire easier to understand; secondly, independent of age, is completion of an animated questionnaire easier for sick children in hospital settings; and thirdly, do children’s preferences for the different formats of the questionnaire vary by the age of the child. Methods: Using a balanced cross-over trial, we administered different formats of the CHU-9D to 221 healthy children in a school setting and 217 children with health problems in a hospital setting. The study tested five versions of the CHU-9D questionnaire: paper text, tablet text, tablet still image, paper image and tablet animation. Results: Our results indicated that the majority of the children aged 4–7 years found the CHU-9D questions easy to answer independent of the format of the questionnaire administered. Amongst children aged 7–14 with health problems, the format of questionnaire influenced understanding. Children aged 7–11 years found the tablet image and animation formats easier compared to text questionnaires, while the oldest children in hospital found text-based questionnaires easier compared to image and animation. Conclusion: Children in all three age groups preferred animation on a tablet to other methods of assessment. Our results highlight the potential for using an animated preference-based measure to assess the health of children as young as 4 years.