Faculty of Medicine and Life Sciences, Hasselt University, Diepenbeek, Belgium.
Future Health Department, Hospital Oost-Limburg, Genk, Belgium.
JMIR Mhealth Uhealth. 2019 Oct 29;7(10):e12586. doi: 10.2196/12586.
Medical smartphone apps and mobile health devices are rapidly entering mainstream use because of the rising number of smartphone users. Consequently, a large amount of consumer-generated data is being collected. Technological advances in innovative sensory systems have enabled data connectivity and aggregation to become cornerstones in developing workable solutions for remote monitoring systems in clinical practice. However, few systems are currently available to handle such data, especially for clinical use.
The aim of this study was to develop and implement the digital health research platform for mobile health (DHARMA) that combines data saved in different formats from a variety of sources into a single integrated digital platform suitable for mobile remote monitoring studies.
DHARMA comprises a smartphone app, a Web-based platform, and custom middleware and has been developed to collect, store, process, and visualize data from different vendor-specific sensors. The middleware is a component-based system with independent building blocks for user authentication, study and patient administration, data handling, questionnaire management, patient files, and reporting.
A prototype version of the research platform has been tested and deployed in multiple clinical studies. In this study, we used the platform for the follow-up of pregnant women at risk of developing pre-eclampsia. The patients' blood pressure, weight, and activity were semi-automatically captured at home using different devices. DHARMA automatically collected and stored data from each source and enabled data processing for the end users in terms of study-specific parameters, thresholds, and visualization.
The increasing use of mobile health apps and connected medical devices is leading to a large amount of data for collection. There has been limited investment in handling and aggregating data from different sources for use in academic and clinical research focusing on remote monitoring studies. In this study, we created a modular mobile health research platform to collect and integrate data from a variety of third-party devices in several patient populations. The functionality of the platform was demonstrated in a real-life setting among women with high-risk pregnancies.
由于智能手机用户数量的增加，医疗智能手机应用程序和移动健康设备正迅速普及。因此，大量的消费者生成的数据正在被收集。创新传感器技术的进步使数据连接和聚合成为开发临床实践中远程监测系统可行解决方案的基石。然而，目前很少有系统能够处理这些数据，特别是对于临床应用。
本研究旨在开发和实施移动健康的数字健康研究平台（DHARMA），该平台将来自各种来源的不同格式的数据合并到一个适合移动远程监测研究的单一集成数字平台中。
DHARMA 包括一个智能手机应用程序、一个基于网络的平台和定制的中间件，旨在收集、存储、处理和可视化来自不同供应商特定传感器的数据。中间件是一个基于组件的系统，具有独立的构建块，用于用户认证、研究和患者管理、数据处理、问卷管理、患者档案和报告。
研究平台的原型版本已经过测试并部署在多个临床研究中。在这项研究中，我们使用该平台对有先兆子痫风险的孕妇进行随访。患者的血压、体重和活动情况在家中使用不同的设备半自动地进行采集。DHARMA 自动从每个源收集和存储数据，并为最终用户提供针对特定研究的参数、阈值和可视化的数据处理。
移动健康应用程序和联网医疗设备的使用越来越多，导致大量数据需要收集。在关注远程监测研究的学术和临床研究中，对处理和聚合来自不同来源的数据的投资有限。在这项研究中，我们创建了一个模块化的移动健康研究平台，用于收集和整合来自多种第三方设备的数据，应用于高危妊娠妇女等多种患者人群。该平台的功能在实际环境中高危妊娠妇女中得到了验证。
