JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Post-COVID19 syndrome, also referred as ‘long covid’, describes persisting symptoms after SARS-CoV2 infection, including myalgia, fatigue, respiratory or neurological symptoms. Objective symptoms are often lacking, thus resembling a fibromyalgia-like syndrome. Digital therapeutics have shown efficiency in similar chronic disorders such as fibromyalgia, offering specific disease monitoring and interventions such as cognitive behavioral therapy or physical and respiratory exercise guidance.

Objective:

To study requirements and features of a new mobile health application in patients suffering from fibromyalgia-like post-COVID19 syndrome in a clinical trial.

Methods:

We created a web-application prototype for the post-COVID19 syndrome called ‘POCOS’, as an online rehabilitation tool aiming to improve clinical outcomes. Only patients without organ damage or ongoing inflammation will be included in the study. The app use will be assessed by user experience questionnaires, focus groups and clinical data analysis. Subsequently, we will analyze cross-sectional and longitudinal clinical data.

Results:

The front-end development of the mHealth app consists of a clinically adapted app interface with a simplified patient reported outcome assessment, monitoring of medical interventions and disease activity as well as online instructions for specific physical and respiratory exercises, stress reduction and lifestyle instructions. The enrollment of the participants is expected for November 2021.

Conclusions:

User experience plays an important role in digital therapeutics and needs to be clinically tested to allow further improvement. We here describe this process for a new application for the treatment of the fibromyalgia-like post-COVID19 syndrome and discuss the relevance of the potential outcomes such as natural disease course and diseases phenotypes.