Can mHealth Tools, Smart Clothing Help in Chronic Fatigue Research?
Researchers in Canada are launching a five-year program that will use mHealth wearables, such as sensor-embedded clothing, to gather biometric data from people living with chronic fatigue syndrome.
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By - mHealth researchers in Canada are launching a five-year project to gather information through wearables and smart clothing to help people living with chronic fatigue syndrome.
The Canadian Institutes of Health Research today unveiled the Interdisciplinary Canadian Collaborative Myalgic Encephalomyelitis - ICANCME - Research Network. The program will use mHealth platforms developed by Hexoskin, a Montreal-based developer of smart clothing and connected health software, to gather biometric data from participants.
Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, also called chronic fatigue syndrome, affects between 836,000 and 2.5 million Americans and another 500,000 Canadians, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Characterized by severe fatigue and sleep problems, it often goes undiagnosed or even misdiagnosed, and has therefore been difficult to analyze.
“Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME) is possibly the last medical enigma of the 21st Century,” Dr. Alain Moreau, Scientific Director of the Viscogliosi Laboratory in Molecular Genetics of Musculoskeletal Diseases in Montreal and the program’s principal investigator, said in a press release. “Our scientific partnership with Hexoskin will be instrumental to address the complexity of ME given its clinical heterogeneity and phenotypic variability overtime.”
“The Hexoskin wearable technologies will allow researchers and clinicians to investigate people severely affected by ME - housebound or bedridden - which is rarely done due to their limited capacity to participate in clinical studies,” he added.
Hexoskin has been at the forefront of mHealth development of smart clothing, which can be used to track biometric data from people in remote or extreme locations, including wilderness areas, deep-sea projects, battlefields and outer space.
In addition, digital health experts see sensor-embedded clothing as a means of unobtrusively gathering data for remote patient monitoring programs and other projects that aim to track people with chronic or complex medical conditions in daily life.
‘’We believe this project will help us understand how to better take care of patients presenting symptoms of ME,” Hexoskin CEO Pierre-Alexandre Fournier said in the press release. “Recent data shows that the prevalence of this disease is higher than previously estimated and has an enormous impact on Canadians living with ME and our society. Data collected in this project will impact millions of lives.”
