Together with colleagues from the Universities of Regensburg, Magdeburg and Krems, Rüdiger Pryss and Manfred Reichert succeeded with launching the research topic "Smart Mobile Data Collection in the Context of Neuroscience" in Frontiers of Neuroscience, a leading journal in its field with an impact factor of 3.566. The research topic is assigned to the Neural Technology section of the journal.
The aim of the research topic is to bring internationally leading experts together in order to provide a comprehensive view on smart mobile data collection in the field of Neuroscience. A full description of the research topic as well as guidelines for submitting manuscripts can be found on the corresponding homepage of the journal.
About the Research Topic
The assessment of chronic disorders is a challenging issue for researchers, medical doctors, and healthcare professionals. While researchers focus on how to reveal valuable data sources, medical doctors crave for new therapies in their daily clinical practice. In line with these drawbacks, the ongoing proliferation of mobile devices offers promising perspectives. In particular, mobile devices are shifting the way how patient data is collected. Moreover, data collection can be accomplished in everyday life, which might offer completely new insights, enabling more individualized treatments. For example, for many individuals suffering from a chronic disorder, their symptoms vary over time. Established assessment methods neither systematically assess this moment-to-moment variability nor environmental factors having an effect on chronic disorders.
One promising approach for collecting ecological valid longitudinal datasets at rather low costs constitutes mobile crowdsensing. Projects like TrackYourTinnitus have already been able to reveal new medical insights from crowd data collected with smart mobile devices, e.g., results on prospective reports vs. retrospective ratings of tinnitus variability and tinnitus-stress associations were reported. In general, only little is known to what degree such retrospective reports reflect the actual experiences made in everyday life. In general, technical solutions like crowdsensing platforms might be a valuable target to help patients to demystify their chronic disorder and to get better control of it. Moreover, in the context of Neuroscience and chronic disorders the researchers can be provided with more valuable data sources. In general, when using this new way of data collection in Neuroscience and chronic disorders, challenging research issues emerge that need to be carefully addressed, e.g, concerning data quality, privacy and security, standardization of mobile data collection procedures, gainable insights into moment-to-moment variability of patients, role of ecological momentary assessments in the context of mobile data collection approaches, and so forth.
For more information, visit the research topics’s homepage.