Minimising Participant Burden in Clinical Trials: How MAI Motion is Changing the Game

Introduction

Clinical trial s play a crucial role in developing new treatments and advancing healthcare. However, participating in these studies often places a significant burden on volunteers. Long visits, complex procedures, and frequent appointments can make the experience tiring and inconvenient, sometimes leading participants to drop out. Reducing this “ participant burden ” is essential for maintaining successful trials and collecting reliable data. In this article, we’ll look at how MAI Motion , a breakthrough technology, is making clinical trial s easier and more accessible for everyone involved.

What is Participant Burden?

Participant burden describes the range of challenges people face during clinical trial s — from the time and effort involved in traveling to clinics, to undergoing uncomfortable tests and managing lengthy paperwork. These demands can be stressful and overwhelming, discouraging continued participation and potentially compromising the quality of the data collected. When trial participants feel overloaded, attendance drops and results become less dependable. That’s why lightening this load is important not just for those taking part, but for the research community as a whole.

Meet MAI Motion: Smarter Participation Made Simple

MAI Motion is a modern platform designed with the participant’s experience in mind. Traditionally, clinical trial s have required multiple in-person visits, but MAI Motion brings much of the process directly to participants’ homes. By using advanced, marker-less motion capture technology, MAI Motion allows individuals to take part in trials flexibly and comfortably. This shift toward at-home participation has already proven to improve retention and boost the quality of information collected. Marker-less motion capture , for instance, is now able to estimate human movement simply from regular video, making clinical assessments far more convenient.

How MAI Motion Reduces Participant Burden

Here’s what sets MAI Motion apart:

  • Remote Assessments: Participants no longer need to travel to clinics for every check-up. Instead, they can complete assessments remotely, saving time and minimizing disruption to their daily routines. Clinicians can review movement data gathered from afar, giving them valuable insights without the participant ever leaving home.
  • Simplified Protocols: Recent research has shown that reducing repetitive tasks can make trials easier without sacrificing data quality. For example, performing three sit-to-stand movements instead of five has been found to require less effort from participants while still producing robust biomechanical information (Wen et al., 2025). This not only lessens physical fatigue but also shortens assessments significantly.
  • User-Friendly Design: MAI Motion ’s intuitive platform is easy for anyone to use, regardless of technical background. This lowers barriers to participation, ensuring that more people can get involved and stay engaged.
  • Efficient Data Collection: Automated data gathering eliminates the repetition and errors that come with manual paperwork. Participants aren’t bogged down by forms or confusing instructions, making the entire process smoother and more accurate. Marker-less technology, in particular, captures movement in a natural way, free from the uncomfortable markers used in older systems.

By bringing together these features, MAI Motion creates a clinical trial experience that fits seamlessly into participants’ lives — making the process less demanding and much more appealing.

The Future of Clinical Trials

The advantages of MAI Motion extend beyond individual comfort. When clinical trial s are easier to join and follow, more people sign up and stick with them, leading to stronger and more reliable research outcomes. Improved data quality helps researchers make better decisions quickly, which can accelerate the development of new treatments. MAI Motion also reflects a broader shift toward digital health and remote research methods — changes that promise a more efficient, patient-centered approach to clinical trial s in the years ahead. As technologies like MAI Motion become standard, clinical studies will become not only faster and more effective, but also more flexible and responsive to the needs of participants.

Conclusion

MAI Motion is transforming clinical trial s by focussing on the needs of participants and reducing the demands placed on them. Through intuitive technology and thoughtful research design, it lessens fatigue and inconvenience, empowering both participants and researchers to achieve the best possible outcomes. As clinical research continues to innovate, solutions like MAI Motion will be key to creating trials that are scientifically sound and genuinely supportive of those who make them possible.

References

Kai Armstrong, Yan Wen, Lei Zhang, Xujiong Ye, & Paul Lee. (2022). Novel Clinical Applications of Marker-less Motion Capture as a Low-cost Human Motion Analysis Method in the Detection and Treatment of Knee Osteoarthritis. . https://doi.org/10.4172/2167-7921.2022.11.053

Wen, Y., Verma, T., Whitehead, J. P., & Lee, P. (2025). Empirical validation of a streamlined three-repetition sit-to-stand protocol using MAI Motion. Applied Sciences, 15(10), Article 5688. https://doi.org/10.3390/app15105688