Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Formative Research
Date Submitted: Apr 27, 2021
Date Accepted: Jan 14, 2022
Cost and effort considerations for the development of intervention studies using m-health platforms: A pragmatic case study
ABSTRACT
The research marketplace has seen a flood of open-source or commercial platforms designed to facilitate aggregation of active Ecological Momentary Assessment or passive sensor data in order to track behaviours and/or measure intervention effects in real-time. It is important for clinician-researchers to ask the right questions, in a thorough manner, when selecting a commercial m-health platform to deploy in their research projects. This paper presents a practical framework clinician-researchers should consider when selecting a commercial m-health platform to deploy in their research projects. Variables such as cost, data protection, and participant privacy are obvious to most. However, additional logistical and functional considerations such as platform IT support, diversity of data collection facilitated by a given platform, fitness for observational research versus real-time intervention development and delivery are essential to consider prior to deciding on a platform. A platform developed by The Flinders University Human Centred Health Informatics lab is described and critiqued against the proposed framework. A proof-of-concept implementation in Behavioural Activation Therapy is outlined to show the practical implications of the choices made against the framework.
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Copyright
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