Clinical research has a vocabulary of its own, and TrialPilot adds a few terms of its own on top. The same words appear on both surfaces — a coordinator configures an assessment schedule in the Study Builder, and a participant sees those assessments as tasks on their phone — so it helps when everyone means the same thing by them.
This page defines each term in a sentence or two and links to the page that covers it in depth. It is meant for skimming, not reading top to bottom.
Studies and organizations#
- Organization
- The research group, sponsor, site, or institution that owns studies in TrialPilot. Members are invited by an organization administrator and act within a role. See Accounts and organizations.
- Study
- A research protocol run on TrialPilot, from an observational survey study to a randomized trial. A study belongs to one organization and is configured in the Study Builder.
- Draft vs published study
- A new study begins in draft: fully configurable, not yet enrolling, and usable as a sandbox. Publishing validates the configuration and opens the study for enrollment; published studies may lock some fields so the trial record stays stable. See Publish and recruit.
- Study arm
- A group of participants assigned to one path through the study — for example an intervention arm and a placebo arm. Arms are configured with the study design and randomization.
- Blinding
- Whether people know which arm a participant is in. Studies can be open label, single blind, or double blind, and blinded team members never see the code-to-arm mapping. See Randomization and blinding.
- Adaptive platform study
- A study that evaluates multiple intervention arms against a shared control, with arms entering or leaving according to pre-specified rules. See Adaptive platform studies.
- Invite code
- The code each study carries for joining it — participants enter an 8-character code in the app, or reach it through a shared link or QR code. Invite-only studies require an invite path; public studies can also appear in discovery. See Join a study.
- Test mode (sandbox)
- The rehearsal mode every draft study gets. Team members enroll with a dedicated
TEST-code and live the real participant experience, and every record they create is flagged as test data that can never appear in a real dataset. See Test mode.
The participant experience#
- Enrollment
- Joining a study. A participant reviews the study details, gives consent, and becomes part of the study under a study-scoped pseudonym. See Join a study.
- eConsent
- Electronic informed consent: the in-app screen a participant reads and accepts before enrolling, covering the study overview and procedures, risks and benefits, and compensation. Consent is recorded online at the moment it is given. Study teams author it in Consent and ethics setup.
- Study plan
- A participant's personal schedule for a study, built from the protocol: baseline tasks, daily check-ins, scheduled assessments, and intervention logs, surfaced day by day on the app's Home screen. See Check-ins and assessments.
- Baseline period
- The stretch before the intervention begins, used to capture a starting point to compare against: baseline assessments open before the study starts, and a wearable baseline can collect a pre-intervention run-in of wearable data.
- Self-trial
- A structured personal experiment a participant runs inside the app — testing a routine, pacing strategy, supplement, or other personal change — with guardrails so a hopeful trend is not treated as proof. See Self-trials.
- Registry
- The TrialPilot research registry, which participants can choose to join so studies can find them. Researchers querying the registry see counts only, never identities, and TrialPilot sends the invitations. See Publish and recruit.
Data collection#
- Daily check-in
- A short daily questionnaire tracking overall symptoms, post-exertional malaise signals, and specific symptoms chosen by the protocol. Check-ins may prefill yesterday's answers so a participant only adjusts what changed.
- Assessment
- A questionnaire or guided study task scheduled by the study team — at baseline, daily, weekly, on custom study weeks, or one time. Guided physical assessments, such as NASA Lean or sit-to-stand style tasks, can use timers and heart-rate capture. See Assessments and schedules.
- Intervention log
- A participant's record of taking the study product — doses and adherence events — driven by the study's intervention and dosing setup.
- Wearable baseline
- A pre-intervention run-in of wearable data. It can be off or set to a defined number of days; longer baselines can improve analysis but may increase participant burden. See Wearables and health data.
Safety#
- PEM (post-exertional malaise)
- A crash of symptoms after physical, cognitive, or emotional exertion, central to conditions like Long COVID and ME/CFS. TrialPilot detects PEM episodes from daily check-ins, wearable data, and in-app PEM capture, and shows them to the study team by participant pseudonym. See Symptoms and safety.
- Escalation
- A red-flag report routed to emergency care. The participant is instructed to contact emergency resources at the moment of reporting; the study team's queue exists for follow-up and documentation. See Safety operations.
- Triage
- The clinical review queue for participant symptom reports. A reviewer converts a report into a recordable adverse event or dismisses it with a reason — the system never classifies self-reports as adverse events on its own.
- Adverse event
- A recorded medical problem during a study, managed through a full safety workflow: seriousness criteria, signed causality assessment, expectedness, reportability, and reporting obligations. See Safety operations.
Data and privacy#
- Pseudonym (study-scoped ID)
- The identifier researchers see instead of a name, such as
P-0001. It is stable within a study, different for the same person in every other study, and cannot be reversed to an identity. See Privacy and de-identification. - Database lock
- The controlled step that protects a study's dataset for analysis. Data that arrives late for a locked study is quarantined for review rather than merged or dropped. See Locking and closeout.
For how these pieces fit together in sequence, read How TrialPilot works. For who can see and do what, read Roles and permissions.