Smart Mobile Data Collection als neues Forschungsthema in Frontiers of Neuroscience

Universität Ulm

Zusammen mit Kollegen der Universitäten Regensburg und Magdeburg sowie der Donauuniversität Krems etablieren Rüdiger Pryss und Manfred Reichert  das Forschungsthema "Smart Mobile Data Collection in the Context of Neuroscience" in der renommierten Fachzeitschrift Frontiers of Neuroscience (Impact Factor: 3.566).

Das Ziel des neu etablierten Forschungsthemas ist es, die Forschungsarbeiten international führender Experten im Berich von „Smart Mobile Data Collection in the Field of Neuroscience“ zusammen zu führen, um so einen möglichst breiten und fundierten Überblick zum Stand der Technik zu schaffen. Eine Beschreibung des Forschungsthemas sowie Richtlinien für die Einreichung von Manuskripten finden sich auf der entsprechenden Homepage der Zeitschrift.

Hintergründe zum Thema des Call for Manuscripts (in Englisch):

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.

Weitere Informationen zum Forschungsthema finden sich auf der betreffenden Homepage.