The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and LifeMap Solutions, a digital health solutions subsidiary of BioTime, are bringing their Asthma Health app to the users in the United Kingdom and Ireland. Released in March 2015 as one of the first Apple ResearchKit apps, it enables individuals with asthma to participate in a large-scale medical research study by simply using their Apple iPhones.
Over the past year in the United States, Asthma Health enrolled over 8,600 study participants, making it one of the largest real-world epidemiological studies of asthma.
“Now we’re going global by adding the UK and Ireland to our clinical research platform, to collect an unprecedented breadth and depth of ‘real world’ health data and create a more holistic view of individuals and the disease on a population level,” Eric Schadt, PhD, the Jean C. and James W. Crystal Professor of Genomics at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and Founding Director of the Icahn Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology, said in a statement.
With the UK and Ireland “on board,” researchers hope to conduct a randomized controlled trial, specifically A/B testing a new app feature to assess its impact on engagement and the retention of recruited participants over time. Also, the UK version of Asthma Health features enhanced air quality readings from BreezoMeter with an intuitive map of real-time data to help patients and doctors identify environmental triggers. Other features, such as Doctor Dashboard and EMR (electronic medical record) integration, will come included as well.
“Looking ahead, we plan to introduce positive feedback and reward mechanisms to participants for daily usage in order to increase long term retention and bolster powerful data collection,” stated Corey Bridges, CEO of LifeMap Solutions.
The Asthma Health app is available as a free download in the Apple App Store