Accepted for/Published in: JMIR mHealth and uHealth
Date Submitted: Oct 23, 2018
Open Peer Review Period: Oct 23, 2018 - Dec 17, 2018
Date Accepted: Jun 15, 2019
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Vendor-independent mobile health monitoring platform: A research platform for digital health studies
ABSTRACT
Background:
Nowadays medical smartphone applications and mobile health devices are becoming mainstream. Due to the rising number of smartphone users, mobile health applications start to penetrate into consumer markets, leading to a large amount of consumer-generated data. Based on technological advancements in innovative sensory systems, data connectivity and aggregation become a cornerstone in finding a workable solution to manage remote monitoring in clinical practices. Especially towards clinical applications, limited tools are available to handle this medical remote monitoring data.
Objective:
The aim of this project was to develop and implement a Digital Health Research Platform for Mobile Health (DHARMA), that combines data of different formats from different sources into one integrated representation in order to create a digital workplace to handle mobile remote monitoring projects.
Methods:
The DHARMA platform comprises a smartphone application, a web-based platform and a custom middleware. DHARMA is developed to collect, store, process and visualize data from different vendor-specific sensors. The middleware is a component-based system with independent building block such as: user authentication, study and patient administration, data handling, questionnaire management, patient file and reporting.
Results:
A prototype version of the research platform has been developed, tested and deployed in multiple clinical trials. In this paper, we describe the use of the platform for the follow-up of pregnant women at risk for developing pre-eclampsia. Patients’ blood pressure, weight and activity were semi-automatically captured at home by using different devices. DHARMA automatically captured the data from the different data sources, stored them and allowed processing by using specific study parameters and thresholds and visualization towards end-users.
Conclusions:
The increase in mobile health applications and connected medical devices lead to a large amount of data. Especially for academic and clinical research in telemonitoring projects, limited investments are made to handle and aggregate data from different sources. In this project, a modular mobile health research platform was created that tackles the third-party device integration and the collection of various data feeds from patient populations. The functionality of the platform was demonstrated through a real-life use-case in high-risk pregnancies.
Citation
Per the author's request the PDF is not available.
Copyright
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