What running OCTAL looks like in your study
What is running MiniOCTAL like as a researcher? Here is a very brief description. If you want to know more, please contact us at octal@psy.ox.ac.uk.
Your study
Once your licence is approved, we set up your study and send you a link that you can share with your participants to run on their own device. With it comes a detailed guidebook on how to use the link and how to modify it to include an anonymised participant ID.
Participants just click the link and start the test on any device they have. We highly recommend a smartphone over a tablet or computer, simply because our normative data were collected on smartphones across all ages.
You will have a dashboard page to monitor completion rates, and a secure user page with full access to all data: raw and processed results for each task and each participant.
Sending the link to participants
Participants do not need to type any ID. You, the researcher, preset their anonymised ID in the link before you send it; the guidebook shows exactly how. Each link can be used multiple times: a unique session ID is generated every time a participant clicks the link they received. Check the ID carefully before sending: data are saved under whatever ID the link carries, and a wrong one cannot be corrected afterwards.
This is the template we send to our own participants. Adapt it to your study.
Dear [name],
Thank you for taking part. Please complete the OCTAL brain-health activities using the link below:
[study link with this participant's code]
It takes about 10 minutes. Please use your own smartphone, held upright, in a quiet place, and turn off notifications. It works best in Chrome, and also works in other common browsers. There is nothing to download. Each activity explains itself on screen and starts with a short practice.
Your answers are saved after each task. If the screen gets stuck, or your phone or Wi-Fi goes off, simply refresh the page, or copy the full web address into another browser, and carry on.
If you have any questions, please contact [study team contact].
Participant codes
Keep the code simple: letters and numbers only (hyphens and underscores are fine). Do not use spaces or symbols such as ? / \ & # %, and do not include anything that identifies the person. For first tests use codes such as test01.
A general link for demonstrations
Where you do not need to tell people apart, for example a PPIE review or a team walkthrough, send everyone the same link with a shared code such as demo. Every session from that link is saved under that code, so the data are easy to find and remove later. To match feedback to a particular session, give each reviewer their own code (demo01, demo02 and so on).
What can be changed
- Tasks and order. Any task can be left out and the order can change. Tell us what your study needs when the licence is set up.
- Language. The tasks are available in 44 languages. A licence can run in one language, or show participants a chooser. We can also add a language that is not yet covered, but we need native speakers from your team to proofread the translation first.
- Speech recording. The optional speech module records audio, so it needs explicit consent in your ethics approval. It is placed last, so a participant can decline it by stopping before it without losing any earlier data.
- Other systems. A participant can arrive from a survey platform with their code in the link and be sent back afterwards; the REDCap integration SOP below is the worked example.
Documents
Licensed teams receive a guidebook written for their study. The documents below are available to read before you commit to a licence: contact us at octal@psy.ox.ac.uk and we will send you the link and password. Together they cover what the tasks measure, how to get your data out, and what an ethics committee will ask. The operator's certificate is public and linked here.
- Task and metric codebook: What each task measures and how every output column and key metric is derived.
- Data download guide: How to sign in and download your study's raw and processed data.
- REDCap integration SOP: Launching MiniOCTAL from a REDCap survey and returning participants to REDCap afterwards.
- Ethics information: Hosting, security and governance answers for ethics committees and R&D offices, with approved participant-information wording.
- Platform operator ISO 27001 / ISO 9001 certificate: Third-party certificate of the company that operates the servers (certificate 496282025, valid to 6 Nov 2026).
Where data are held, and who can see them
| Where stored | On the Oxford Cognitive Testing Portal, run by the University of Oxford and operated by Open Science Tools Ltd. The primary server is in Gravelines, France; backups are held in Strasbourg, France. Both are in the EU. |
|---|---|
| How saved | At the end of each task, one file per task, named by participant code, task, date and time. A session that stops part-way keeps every completed task. |
| Identifiers | Only the participant code in the link. No names, contact details or IP addresses are recorded. |
| Who has access | The members of your team you nominate, each with their own login. Every access is logged. Nobody else can reach the study repository. |
| Encryption | All traffic is encrypted in transit (HTTPS). Data on the portal are encrypted at rest; the operator is extending encryption at rest to the backups. |
| Speech recordings | Saved under the participant code only and analysed offline on University of Oxford computers. No recording is sent to a commercial or cloud speech service, and only anonymised summary measures are reported. |
For a research ethics committee or NHS R&D office, ask us for the Ethics information document. It carries these facts in writing from the platform operator, the ISO 27001 certificate number, and approved participant-information wording you can adapt.