Laura Chouette on Unsplash This study aims to measure the mental, educational and physiological effects of sleep deprivation on adolescents and means of alleviating those effects. Participants are aged 13–18, and will spend 15 days sequestered in a study facility under the supervision of the study team. They may be in contact with parents and others via telephone and internet, but leaving the premises will constitute withdrawal from the study. Participants will be randomly assigned either a normal sleep regimen or a sleep-deprived regimen. Throughout the day and night, they will wear a movement-sensitive wristband to measure physical activity and sleep patterns. On 4 nights, sleep will be monitored via electrodes placed on their body. During the day, participants will be given regular meals (food other than that provided by researchers is not permitted), attend science education activities and undergo a battery of psychological tests intended to measure the effects […]

An employee at institution A, a physical therapy centre, wishes to conduct an investigation into the effects of a new massage technique developed by the employee on relieving pain in individuals who suffer from chronic back problems. Institution A does not routinely conduct human subjects research, and as such is not registered as a research institution with Ministry of Health (MOH) and has no IRB. The employee will be collaborating with institution B, a hospital with a patient pool that would be recruited into the study; the employee of Institution A would visit patients at Institution B and administer the massage. Furthermore, a researcher at institution C, a university, is interested in collaborating with the employee to design the study, analyse the results and write it up for publication. Both institutions B and C have IRBs; B is registered with MOH as a research institution. Institutions A and B are […]

The proposed study will test the effect of a fitness band combined with monetary incentives on the fitness activity of participants. Participants will be given a fitness band to wear that monitors their number of steps taken each day, over a period of a month, and transmits the information to a central server. Each day they walk 10,000 steps, they will receive $10 (paid out at the end of the 30 days). Data will be transmitted to researchers in anonymized form, without individual identifiers. Researchers will analyse the data to determine whether the incentives had an effect on the number of steps taken, and in turn various health indicators. Developed for use at the February 2016 CENTRES workshop on the Human Biomedical Research Act. © 2016 National University of Singapore. Questions for Discussion Is this study within the scope of the Human Biomedical Research Act?

A professor is interested in the extent to which students’ medical issues affect their academic ability. He wants to recruit students at his college to fill in a questionnaire concerning any major health issues they have had in the past year, including dates and purpose of non-routine visits to the college’s health services. He also will ask for their permission to access their academic records from the same period, in order to measure whether there is a strong causal relationship between certain health issues and how well a student does in class. He will use the findings to generate recommendations concerning how professors may want to be sensitive in teaching and assessing students with those health issues highly correlated with poor performance. The researcher requests of his IRB a waiver of the requirement for consent. While the study uses identifiable health information, the researcher argues that the study is observational […]

A researcher wishes to conduct a retrospective observational study on the health records of patients at a particular hospital who recently underwent a cardiovascular surgery in the past year. The researcher would be looking for correlations between long-term complications arising from the surgery and an array of risk factors indicated in the patients’ charts – weight, smoking habits, reported exercise, hypertension levels, etc. – with the goal of using the results to tailor follow-up care based on personalized risk factors. The records of all 822 patients who underwent cardiovascular surgery at that hospital in the past year would be accessed in the course of the study. The researcher requests a waiver of consent from her IRB, on the grounds that the risk is minimal (data will be kept secure within the hospital’s servers) and the study would be impracticable without the waiver (It may be difficult to contact all 822 […]

The purpose of the study is to determine whether intensive, short term reflex training methods on the performance of proficient amateur players of fast paced action online video games (based on actions per minute) can be enhanced to the level of professional players. Actions per minute (APM) is a measurement of a player’s load handling capacity and is one of the metrics for judging player skill. A casual player can hit 50 APM; an experienced player, 75 APM; a proficient player 150 APM; and professional players can get up to 500–600 APM.   A sample of 40 secondary school students who are proficient players (150 APM) of a fast paced action online video game are randomly assigned to two groups. 20 students will be assigned to the intensive, short term training group and 20 students to the control group. The students in the training group will follow a daily one-hour […]