Mobile health technologies can provide a rich stream of information about an individual’s biology, thoughts, emotions, behavior, and what is going on in the daily environment. The data can yield new insights into factors that lead to diseases and used in real-time to prompt changes in behaviors or environmental exposures.
Few mHealth technologies are currently used in research studies. This is partly due to the lack of data supporting their effectiveness in some cases and partly due to challenges and costs associated with collecting data from large numbers of people using different types of mHealth technologies.
Another barrier that hinders researchers in utilizing mHealth technology is the inability to quickly and effectively determine whether a new technology is clinically useful. To truly validate the usefulness of a new mHealth technology, researchers and developers need quick and substantial feedback from users plus evidence of utility.
To help overcome these barriers and to accelerate mHealth research, NIH has awarded the University of California San Francisco www.ucsf.edu $9.75 million over the next five years (contingent on the availability of funds), to develop an internet-based platform. This would enable researchers to easily and reliably conduct mHealth research and validate the clinical usefulness of new mHealth technologies.
Three principal investigators at UCSF Jeffrey Olgin, M.D, Gregory Marcus M.D, and Mark Pletcher M.D, are currently leading the Health eHeart Study www.health-eheartstudy.org with more than 20,000 participants from around the world.
They are studying cardiovascular disease using information collected from mobile health devices, EMRs, and participant-completed surveys. The new NIH-funded mHealth platform will build upon the Health eHeart platform so that a broader range of diseases and conditions can be studied.
The investigators for the anticipated NIH-funded platform plan to enroll one million participants in the next five years in a study to share their health data using mobile health technologies. By creating an infrastructure where a million people are connected and able to consent electronically, years can be shaved off of the recruitment process.
The platform will make it easier to collect health data from many different mobile health and wireless technologies. Participants will be able to view a list of a wide range of mobile health sensors and apps integrated into the platform, and then share the data.
The platform will also use a system developed by the UCSF team for the Health eHeart study to enable participants to easily donate information from their EMRs, regardless of the hospital or institution and regardless of where the information originated.
Although the platform won’t be ready to enroll new participants for several months, Olgin says individuals interested in becoming part of the million person cohort can sign up now through the Health eHeart Study website at www.health-eheartstudy.org. All adults are invited to sign up and don’t need to have heart disease.
This research is jointly funded by the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering www.nibib.nih.gov, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke www.ninds.nih.gov, National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute www.nhlbi.nih.gov, and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism www.niaaa.nih.gov.