Swipe right for health research

Smartphones and wearables provide major opportunities for advancing health research, answering questions that are important to people living with illness but have been difficult to address in the past. In this talk, Will will describe how patients and the public can contribute to important health research using their own technology. He will illustrate this using examples including the national smartphone study Cloudy with a Chance of Pain and Remote Monitoring of Rheumatoid Arthritis (REMORA).

There are a number of significant barriers that prevent people from becoming involved in mental health research. We have tried to overcome some of these barriers by building a smartphone app. The app enables people to shape the future of mental health research from the comfort of their phone. We’ll talk about how we co-developed the app with young people from the CAMHS. Digital group. This will be an interactive session so bring your smartphone and join in.

Data collected for health research is used in a multitude of different ways to benefit patients and the public. In Claire’s talk, she will outline her PhD work which uses smartphone data to build a ‘pain forecast’. This model (a little like the weather forecast) could help patients with chronic pain to make plans, based on predictions of their pain severity in the future.