Matching individuals to Open Humans accounts

If you have a pre-existing project, you can invite your current users to join Open Humans. This enables them to donate data to your project and/or allows you to return data to their account.

You may be wondering how to match your individuals to their Open Humans accounts.

Depending on your set-up, there's a couple different methods!

Do you already have an account-based website?

If so, you should create an OAuth2 project.

You'll send your users to Open Humans to authorize your project, and you'll receive a user-specific token in return. You can use the token to retrieve this user's project member ID, as well as other data and API features.

Do you have an iOS or Android app?

You can create an OAuth2 project to access Open Humans APIs directly from a device.

Do you have email addresses?

If your data is matched to email addresses, there's a couple approaches you can take to try to match this to an Open Humans account.

1. Ask for email access on Open Humans.
   

   Set up an On-site project and request permission to see a member's email address. If this email address matches the one they've given you, you can match their data.

   This isn't always going to work! Some people will use different email addresses. You might need to communicate with them – and you might want to collect additional information in a form (see below).

2. Create an accounts-based website.
   

   You can create a small accounts-based website, then create a series of accounts for each of these email addresses. You can then send users to connect to Open Humans as an OAuth2 project.

Are there other identifiers someone could share?

Is there some other identifier someone could share with you, that you can use to retrieve their data? For example, their name and date of birth. If you set up as an On-site project, you can send members to a form where they can share additional information with you.