Presentation at the 31st IEEE International Symposium on Computer-Based Medical Systems (CBMS 2018);

Rüdiger Pryss, Karlstad, Sweden, 18 June 2018, 12:15 PM

Presently, many mHealth technologies are applied in the context of chronic diseases to gather data that may lead to new and valuable insights. Many aspects of chronic diseases are not completely understood and new data sources might be promising. mHealth technologies may help in this context as they can be easily used in everyday life. Moreover, the bring your own device principal encourages many patients to use their smartphone for questions on their diseases. The less is known about a disorder (e.g., tinnitus), the more patients crave for new insights and opportunities. Despite the fact that existing mHealth technologies like mobile crowdsensing have gathered data that may help patients, in general, less is known whether and how data gathered with different mobile technologies differ. In this context, one relevant aspect is the contribution of the mobile operating system itself. For example, are there differences between Android and iOS users that utilize the same mHealth technology for a disease. In the TrackYourTinnitus project, a mobile crowdsensing mHealth platform was developed to gather data for tinnitus patients in order to reveal new insights on this disorder with high economic and patient-related burdens. As many data sets were gathered during the last years that enable us to compare Android and iOS users, the work at hand compares charac-teristics of them. Interesting insights could be revealed by this comparison. However, many more evaluations are necessary for TrackYourTinnitus in particular and mHealth technologies in general to understand how smartphone technology affects data gathering on chronic diseases using these technologies in the large.