Asthma Mobile Health Application 2.0

Mobile health applications (MHA) are increasingly being explored as tools to assist in management of chronic diseases. Little is known regarding which characteristics of MHAs are effective and there is limited data suggesting a real-world impact on health outcomes. Asthma is one of the most common and costly of the chronic diseases, impacting a broad range of the population including both children and adults. It is a variable disease necessitating regular medication use, monitoring of symptoms, and avoidance of specific triggers. These characteristics of asthma make it a chronic disease that is particularly amenable to having an MHA facilitate active monitoring outside of periodic traditional medical visits. The study team has designed a MHA focused on asthma subjects to test the feasibility of an asthma mobile health application (AMHA). The AMHA 2.0 study is the result of a collaboration between MHA developers and Mount Sinai faculty with expertise in the fields of asthma, research design, data storage, and data analysis. AMHA 2.0 incorporated elements of usual clinical care (that may take place during typical office visits), such as medication reminders, a daily asthma diary to track asthma control (AC) and medication use, patient education and assessments of quality of life (QoL), and health care utilization (HCU).

During the AMHA 2.0 study, the aims are to evaluate the feasibility of:

1. Consenting and enrolling a small cohort of subjects with asthma recruited from Mount Sinai pulmonary clinics remotely via downloading the app
2. Feasibility of use of an asthma e-diary and automated e-reminders for medications in this small cohort for one month
3. Exploring if a small cohort of participants will share data from wearable health and fitness monitoring devices if they own and use such devices.

The primary enrollment period for AMHA 2.0 was met in September 2015. More than 7,000 individuals e-consented for the AMHA 2.0 study, providing more than 80,000 survey responses with many participants granting AMHA 2.0 investigators access to geo-location and wellness data. Data collected during the first six months of the AMHA 2.0 study has provided evidence to answer all primary outcome measures.

Continuation of the AMHA 2.0 protocol was approved in December 2015, expanding the study to a larger population who will be followed for a more extended period of time and will be recruited via availability of the AMHA in the Apple App Store in the US, UK, and Ireland. The latest modification submitted in January, adds an entirely new aim, OM6 and SA6, to the project to include a genetics module. The objectives for the continuation study are: