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Effective fraud prevention and participant validation are essential for ensuring data quality in today's highly-digitized research landscape. Increasingly sophisticated bots and high levels of fraudulent participants have generated a need for more complex and nuanced methods to combat fraudulent activity. In this paper, we share our experiences with fraudulent survey responses, which we encountered in our work around abortion storytelling, and the multi-stage protocol that we developed to validate participants. We found that effective fraud prevention should start early and include a variety of flagging methods to encourage holistic pattern-searching in data. Researchers should overestimate the amount of time they will need to validate participants and consider asking participants to assist in the validation process. We encourage researchers to be transparent about the interpretive nature of this work. To this end, we contribute a Participant Validation Guide in supplemental materials for community members to adapt in their own practices. 

Research on smart home monitoring for older adults has predominantly focused on systems whose data and alerts are directed towards family members, caregivers, or healthcare providers. Older adults have expressed interest in engaging with these systems by seeing and using their data, but they are often limited to a passive role as subjects of monitoring. This paper presents qualitative results of a longitudinal smart home project with older adults living independently in the community. Based on interviews conducted throughout the 2.5-year study with 12 participants, we report on their lived experiences of having the monitoring system in their homes and on how they reflected on the data collected by the system. The results show how participants were able to extract meaningful information from the monitoring data without finding the system invasive or intrusive. Specifically, older adults exhibited interest in data that they found indicative of living an active lifestyle, such as time spent outside the home. Drawing from critical literature on active aging, we discuss implications for incorporating peer comparisons to support reflection on personal health data without reinforcing a deficit narrative of aging.