Accepted for/Published in: JMIR mHealth and uHealth
Date Submitted: Feb 17, 2017
Open Peer Review Period: Feb 17, 2017 - Jun 27, 2017
Date Accepted: Sep 23, 2017
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Detecting Acute Otitis Media Symptom Episodes Using a Mobile App: Cohort Study
ABSTRACT
Background:
Population cohort studies are useful to study infectious diseases episodes not attended by health care services, but conventional paper diaries and questionnaires to capture cases are prone to noncompliance and recall bias. Use of smart technology in this setting may improve case finding.
Objective:
The objective of our study was to validate an interactive mobile app for monitoring occurrence of acute infectious diseases episodes in individuals, independent of health care seeking, using acute otitis media (AOM) symptom episodes in infants as a case study. We were interested in determining participant compliance and app performance in detecting and ascertaining (parent-reported) AOM symptom episodes with this novel tool compared with traditional methods used for monitoring study participants.
Methods:
We tested the InfectieApp research app to detect AOM symptom episodes. In 2013, we followed 155 children aged 0 to 3 years for 4 months. Parents recorded the presence of AOM symptoms in a paper diary for 4 consecutive months and completed additional disease questionnaires when AOM symptoms were present. In 2015 in a similar cohort of 69 children, parents used an AOM diary and questionnaire app instead.
Results:
During conventional and app-based recording, 93.13% (17,244/18,516) and 94.56% (7438/7866) of symptom diaries were returned, respectively, and at least one symptom was recorded for 32.50% (n=5606) and 43.99% (n=3272) of diary days (P<.01). The incidence of AOM symptom episodes was 605 and 835 per 1000 child-years, respectively. Disease questionnaires were completed for 59% (17/29) of episodes when participants were using conventional recording, compared with 100% (18/18) for app-based recording.
Conclusions:
The use of the study’s smart diary app improved AOM case finding and disease questionnaire completeness. For common infectious diseases that often remain undetected by health care services, use of this technology can substantially improve the accurateness of disease burden estimates.
Citation
Per the author's request the PDF is not available.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.