Open mHealth

A new data architecture for accelerating progress in pain treatment

Trialist is a mobile app for custom experiments comparing pain treatments.

SHARING DATA

is powerful. Chronic pain and other complex conditions can’t be understood from a single perspective, and no single source of data is adequate for discovery, understanding, and treatment. Although a deep divide still exists between clinical and research data and the observations we make in daily life, the prospect of integration of diverse data offers tremendous benefits, from new opportunities for scientific progress to individualized support for people in pain. We need a standardized way to harmonize disparate sources of information (including Apple’s HealthKit, Fitbit and other consumer devices, and clinical data from EHRs).

OPEN MHEALTH

is building the Internet for mobile health data. Our open-source framework gives everybody a standardized way to harmonize disparate sources of information (including Apple’s HealthKit, Fitbit and other consumer devices, and clinical data from EHRs). Using Open mHealth, developers can store, process, and visualize this data so it can be useful to both patients and clinicians.

VALID EXPERIMENTS

of any size can be built using Open mHealth. For people dealing with pain we’ve created an app called Trialist that allows chronic pain patients and clinicians to run personalized experiments (n-of-1 trials), comparing two different pain treatments. With our collaborators at the University of California, Davis, we are currently doing a clinical study funded by the National Institutes of Health. In the clinic, the clinician and patient agree on a protocol, such as a comparison of two pain medications. Collecting the data and supporting measurements is easy using the Trialist app, and the results are shared and presented to both the patient and clinician. As the technological capacity to measure pain, function, and emotion increases, the Open mHealth data format and tools can support pain sufferers and clinicians at scale.