Interactive computer program for optimal designs of longitudinal cohort studies

Many large scale longitudinal cohort studies have been carried out or are ongoing in different fields of science. Such studies need a careful planning to obtain the desired quality of results with the available resources. In the past, a number of researches have been performed on optimal designs for longitudinal studies. However, there was no computer program yet available to help researchers to plan their longitudinal cohort design in an optimal way. A new interactive computer program for the optimization of designs of longitudinal cohort studies is therefore presented. The computer program helps users to identify the optimal cohort design with an optimal number of repeated measurements per subject and an optimal allocations of time points within a given study period. Further, users can compute the loss in relative efficiencies of any other alternative design compared to the optimal one. The computer program is described and illustrated using a practical example.