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Monday, March 21, 2016

iPhone app tracks 600 patients in biggest ever Parkinson’s study

TECHNOLOGY NEWS  21 March 2016

Smartphones come stuffed with sensors – now doctors are using them to study people's health on a scale impossible before



How am I feeling right now?

Alex Macro/Corbis


IN BED, at dinner, on your way to work. Our smartphones are always with us, their sensors capturing data about our lives. That data is priceless to firms like Google and their customers, advertisers. But medical researchers are getting in on the act too. Our phones are turning into tools for doing research in unprecedented detail and scale.

A team from Seattle-based non-profit Sage Bionetworks, for instance, is gathering data from thousands of people with Parkinson’s via an app called mPower. They built the app using Apple’s ResearchKit software, which lets individuals opt in to studies through their iPhone.

The team has not yet published any findings, but earlier this month they revealed some of their numbers when they made the data openly available in the interests of accelerating research. A few dozen researchers have already signed up. “We’re very excited by the response,” says Sage’s Andrew Trister.
The idea behind the smartphone approach is simple. Our phones are packed with sensors, including accelerometers, microphones, gyroscopes, cameras and GPS. They can track everything from how much a person moves to variations in their speech and gait. As speech, gait or activity alter over time, doctors can infer changes in an underlying disease. Many other medical devices, such as blood pressure monitors, can now pipe data straight to our phones too.

This means that phones hold ever more detailed records on our health. ResearchKit lets medical researchers gather that information in an ethical way – by asking for permission. Apple’s system makes it easy to create apps that take study participants through a consent process, allowing them to share some or all of their health information anonymously and securely.

Many ResearchKit-based apps also ask participants to do other tasks: taking pictures of their moles in the case of the Mole Mapper, say, or going for a walk and telling MyHeartCounts about it later.
The mPower app asks those in the study to complete tasks such as speaking, tapping on the phone, walking and balancing. The aim is to find out which tasks are the best measure of Parkinson’s symptoms, then to help people control them.

One reason for the excitement about phone-based research is that it is a great way to recruit large numbers of people quickly and cheaply. Just six months after launching ResearchKit, Apple announced that the first apps to use it had already recruited more than 100,000 people between them. But there’s a catch – it may not be easy to hold on to all the volunteers. More than 10,000 people signed up to use mPower, but only 500 to 600 people use it every week, Trister says. This is still a large study for this kind of Parkinson’s research, though.
All trials have people who drop out, says John Torous, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School. But it appears that when signing up involves little more than downloading an app, people are less likely to stick with it. “There’s no one to keep them on track,” he says.

Pestering volunteers can cause a high dropout rate, as the creators of SleepHealth, an app designed to track sleep, may be finding out. “If you’re looking for an app that will keep pestering you with questions, this is one for you,” says the first review. A new version of mPower aims to be less annoying.
Privacy is also a major issue. Anonymising data does not always protect identity, and data from people’s phones can reveal things about them even they don’t know. The mPower study shows that phones could help to diagnose Parkinson’s, for instance, although the team has no plans do this.

It is early days for such research, but Torous is optimistic. “There’s so much real-time data that you can gather,” he says. “I think it may be the wave of the future for research.”
This article will appear in print under the headline “A lab in every pocket”


https://www.newscientist.com/article/2081840-iphone-app-tracks-600-patients-in-biggest-ever-parkinsons-study/?utm_source=NSNS

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