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Alzheimer’s Research Study to Use mHealth for Remote Monitoring

The Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis is launching a five-year study that will use an mHealth app and connected health platform to monitor people living with Dominantly Inherited Alzheimer's Disease.

Source: ThinkStock

By Eric Wicklund

- Researchers at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis will be using an mHealth platform to study how people living with a rare form of early-onset Alzheimer’s Disease can improve care management at home.

The five-year project, launched by the university’s Dominantly Inherited Alzheimer Network (DIAN), will use an mHealth app with gaming technology and a connected health platform developed by Datacubed Health to study those living with Dominantly Inherited Alzheimer’s Disease and create a resource for those in danger of developing the disease.

Those participating in the study will use the Linkt app on mobile devices of their choosing. Through gamified tasks and surveys, they’ll create a database allowing researchers to study how diet, sleep and other biomarkers are affected by the disease in one’s home environment.

The platform “will also be used to support a registry for families confirmed or suspected to have the disease and a longitudinal observational study of family members with parents who have the gene mutation associated with the disease,” officials said. “With research suggesting that brain changes occur years before symptoms develop, the goal is to identify these changes in presymptomatic carriers. Ultimately, researchers hope to develop therapies to detect and treat DIAD at its earliest stages – or prevent it altogether.”

Researchers say that by tailoring the mHealth platform to the user’s home environment – in essence, allowing him or her to choose where, when and on what device to access the app – they’ll see higher patient engagement. They cite studies in which survey and diary compliance was measured between 60 percent and 80 percent in project where a device was provided, and between 87 percent and 96 percent in programs using BYOD protocols.

“Through remote and real-time monitoring of a wide range of biomarkers, we will be able to provide DIAN with access to both Clinical Outcomes and real-world data, even real-world data from nonclinical environments,” Paul W. Glimcher, Chief Executive Officer for Brooklyn-based Datacubed Health, said in a press release. “And as is typical for our platform, by allowing participants to use the app with their own phones, Washington University/DIAN researchers will look to achieve an even higher participant compliance that is typical in studies of this kind.”

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