JMIR mHealth and uHealth
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JMIR mHealth and uHealth · Feb 2017
Apps for People With Rheumatoid Arthritis to Monitor Their Disease Activity: A Review of Apps for Best Practice and Quality.
Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a chronic inflammatory arthritis requiring long-term treatment with regular monitoring by a rheumatologist to achieve good health outcomes. Since people with RA may wish to monitor their own disease activity with a smartphone app, it is important to understand the functions and quality of apps for this purpose. ⋯ This review found a lack of high-quality apps for longitudinal assessment of RA disease activity. Current apps fall into two categories: simple calculators primarily for rheumatologists and data tracking tools for people with RA. The latter do not uniformly collect data using validated instruments or composite disease activity measures. There is a need for appropriate, high-quality apps for use by rheumatologists and patients together in co-management of RA.
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JMIR mHealth and uHealth · Feb 2017
Formative Evaluation of Participant Experience With Mobile eConsent in the App-Mediated Parkinson mPower Study: A Mixed Methods Study.
To fully capitalize on the promise of mobile technology to enable scalable, participant-centered research, we must develop companion self-administered electronic informed consent (eConsent) processes. As we do so, we have an ethical obligation to ensure that core tenants of informed consent-informedness, comprehension, and voluntariness-are upheld. Furthermore, we should be wary of recapitulating the pitfalls of "traditional" informed consent processes. ⋯ Our study serves as a formative evaluation of participant experience with a self-administered informed consent process via a mobile app. Areas for future investigation include direct comparison of the efficacy of self-administered eConsent with facilitated informed consent processes, exploring the potential benefits and pitfalls of smartphone user behavioral habits on participant engagement in research, and developing best practices to increase informedness, comprehension, and voluntariness via participant coengagement in the research endeavor.