Presentation at the XIV Conference of European Society for Traumatic Stress Studies (ESTSS): Trauma in Changing Societies: Social Contexts and Clinical Practice;
Marc Schickler, Vilnius, Litauen, 12 June 2015, 12:15 PM

Smart mobile devices (e.g., smartphones) play a significant role in daily life. In turn, this raises promising perspectives regarding the monitoring of an individual’s health status; e.g., ranging from simple activity tracking (e.g., counting steps) to sophisticated sensing apps (e.g., measuring blood sugar). Especially in clinical trials, smart mobile devices could be used for continuously collecting patient data. However, trials are usually conducted in a well controllable environment (e.g., hospital) where subjects must be present physically. This not only significantly limits the number of subjects involved, but is also time-consuming and costly.

One way to overcome these limitations is to introduce “Mobile Crowd Sensing” in clinical trials; i.e., to provide easy-to-use mobile apps that allow patients to monitor themselves. In particular, this would allow involving more subjects, while at the same time reducing expenses as well as the timespan between data collection and feedback. Additionally, wearables (e.g., pulse tracker) or environmental information (e.g., background noise) can be integrated in real-time, enhancing the data collected.

Based on the experiences we gathered in other projects (e.g., TrackYourTinnitus), we propose a more generic platform, that allows domain experts (e.g., trauma experts) to build sophisticated crowd sensing apps and to process the data collected.