iPhone-only study increases trial population, pinpoints asthma symptom causes

Researchers have conducted a study solely through the iPhone using the Apple ResearchKit. Along with the Asthma Health mobile application, the study showcased how mobile devices can aide in large-scale clinical enrollment, secure data exchange through the app and collection of carious points of data.

The study, titled “The Asthma Mobile Health study” from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, was published in Nature Biotechnology. The study began in March 2015 and reached 50,000 iPhone users within the first six month of the application launch. The study used the Asthma Health mobile app to gauge user’s asthma triggers though surveys.

More than 7,500 participants completed the consent process and entered the study, 85 percent of those participants completed at least one survey, and a core group of 2,317 participants completed multiple surveys.

"The Asthma Mobile Health study represents the coming together of academia and industry to benefit from the ubiquity of smartphones and harness the power of citizen-science to modernize the clinical research process," said Eric Schadt, PhD, senior author on the paper and professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. "We now have the ability to capture rich research data from thousands of individuals to better characterize 'real world' patterns of disease, wellness and behavior. This approach provides a more comprehensive and accurate view of our patients that was not feasible in the past due to logistical limitations and prohibitive costs."

Results showed that the increase in data allowed for researchers to pinpoint why asthma symptoms increased on certain days. For example, symptoms increased on days following a wildfire. Researchers hope to continue to advance the use of mobile technology in studies to increase population data, producing more accurate results with more data.

"We critically assessed the feasibility, strengths, and limitations of a smartphone-based study and found that this methodology is particularly suitable for studies of short duration that require rapid enrollment across diverse geographical locations, frequent data collection, and real-time feedback to participants," said Yvonne Chan, MD, PhD, Director of Digital Health and Personalized Medicine at the Icahn Institute. "Our study demonstrates the power of mobile health tools to scale and accelerate clinical research so that we can derive the evidence needed to inform clinical practice and improve patient care."