mHealth Outcomes in Behavioral Interventions & Longitudinal Evaluation (MOBILE) Platform - Clinical researchers increasingly recognize the potential for mobile health (mHealth) technologies to transform health and medicine by facilitating real-time data collection, self-management, and information sharing between patients, researchers, and clinicians. Yet despite their great promise, use of mHealth technologies – i.e., smartphones and wearables – in clinical settings remains challenging. This is in part due to the high cost and technical demands of the development of mHealth solutions, as well as the lack of inclusion of representative samples in many mHealth studies, which limits the overall generalizability and impact of research results. This has led to poor quality studies and difficulty in accumulating a robust evidence base over time. To address these problems, we propose establishment of the mHealth Outcomes in Behavioral Interventions & Longitudinal Evaluation (MOBILE) Platform at the University of Michigan. The MOBILE Platform will be a specialized clinical and translational science program that serves as a “hub” for innovative mHealth studies. Through this project, we will develop research processes and technical infrastructure to conduct mHealth studies and then work to disseminate these resources to investigators through our established UM1 Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) program. In this project, we will: 1) understand barriers and facilitators to recruitment and retention of individuals from all communities, resulting in development of the Participant Enrollment & Engagement Resource (PEER) toolkit – a suite of best practice guidelines and resources to facilitate mHealth research; 2) build robust and reusable open-source software, the Digital Health Technology Framework (DHTF), that will facilitate collection of mHealth data at scale and development of novel mHealth systems for research; and 3) assess the platform’s functionality in two demonstration projects among cancer survivors (thyroid cancer and prostate cancer) and heart failure patients. Ultimately, the MOBILE Platform will accelerate mHealth research by enhancing the ability of clinical researchers to recruit, enroll, and retain representative participant samples. Finally, this platform will be designed to provide approaches for early dissemination to researchers through the Michigan Institute for Clinical and Health Research (MICHR), our UM1 CTSA program.
