A research team at New York City-based Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai has completed an asthma study conducted entirely via iPhone.
The feasibility study, which was published in Nature Biotechnology, investigated whether mobile health apps can be used to conduct observational clinical studies. The Asthma Mobile Health Study enrolled 7,593 people who downloaded an asthma health iPhone app developed by Mount Sinai using the Apple ResearchKit framework.
The study concluded the smartphone component was successful for large-scale participant enrollment across the country, especially for studies of short duration. Through the iPhone app, the researchers asked asthma patients to complete regular surveys about their condition, while also collecting data related to location and air quality.
"Our study demonstrates the power of mobile health tools to scale and accelerate clinical research so that we can derive the evidence needed to inform clinical practice and improve patient care," said Yvonne Chan, MD, PhD, principal investigator of the study and director of digital health and personalized medicine at the Icahn Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology at Mount Sinai.