Annu Int Conf IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc. 2021 Nov;2021:2358-2362. doi: 10.1109/EMBC46164.2021.9630482.
More and more observational studies exploit the achievements of mobile technology to ease the overall implementation procedure. Many strategies like digital phenotyping, ecological momentary assessments or mobile crowdsensing are used in this context. Recently, an increasing number of intervention studies makes use of mobile technology as well. For the chronic disorder tinnitus, only few long-running intervention studies exist, which use mobile technology in a larger setting. Tinnitus is characterized by its heterogeneous patient's symptom profiles, which complicates the development of general treatments. In the UNITI project, researchers from different European countries try to unify existing treatments and interventions to cope with this heterogeneity. One study arm (UNITI Mobile) exploits mobile technology to investigate newly implemented interventions types, especially within the pan-European setting. The goals are to learn more about the validity and usefulness of mobile technology in this context. Furthermore, differences among the countries shall be investigated. Practically, two native intervention apps have been developed for UNITI and the mobile study arm, which pose features not presented so far in other apps of the authors. Along the implementation procedure, it is discussed whether these features might leverage similar types of studies in future. Since instruments like the mHealth evidence reporting and assessment checklist (mERA), developed by the WHO mHealth technical evidence review group, indicate that aspects shown for UNITI Mobile are important in the context of health interventions using mobile phones, our findings may be of a more general interest and are therefore being discussed in the work at hand.
越来越多的观察性研究利用移动技术的成果来简化整体实施过程。在这种情况下，许多策略如数字表型、生态瞬时评估或移动众包都得到了应用。最近，越来越多的干预研究也利用了移动技术。对于慢性疾病耳鸣，只有少数长期的干预研究使用移动技术进行了更大规模的研究。耳鸣的特点是患者的症状各不相同，这使得一般治疗方法的开发变得复杂。在 UNITI 项目中，来自不同欧洲国家的研究人员试图统一现有的治疗和干预措施，以应对这种异质性。一个研究分支（UNITI Mobile）利用移动技术研究新实施的干预类型，特别是在泛欧范围内。目标是更多地了解移动技术在这种情况下的有效性和实用性。此外，还将调查各国之间的差异。实际上，已经为 UNITI 和移动研究分支开发了两个本地干预应用程序，它们具有作者以前的应用程序中没有的功能。在实施过程中，还讨论了这些功能是否可以在未来用于类似类型的研究。由于世卫组织 mHealth 技术证据审查组开发的 mHealth 证据报告和评估清单（mERA）等工具表明，UNITI Mobile 中展示的方面在使用手机进行健康干预的背景下很重要，因此我们的发现可能具有更普遍的意义，因此正在当前的工作中进行讨论。
