Background: Digital phenotyping provides insights into an individual's digital behaviors and has potential clinical utility.
Objective: In this observational study, we explored digital biomarkers collected from wrist-wearable devices and smartphones and their associations with clinical symptoms and functioning in patients with schizophrenia.
Methods: We recruited 100 outpatients with schizophrenia spectrum disorder, and we collected various digital data from commercially available wrist wearables and smartphones over a 6-month period. In this report, we analyzed the first week of digital data on heart rate, sleep, and physical activity from the wrist wearables and travel distance, sociability, touchscreen tapping speed, and screen time from the smartphones. We analyzed the relationships between these digital measures and patient baseline measurements of clinical symptoms assessed with the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale, Brief Negative Symptoms Scale, and Calgary Depression Scale for Schizophrenia, as well as functioning as assessed with the Social and Occupational Functioning Assessment Scale. Linear regression was performed for each digital and clinical measure independently, with the digital measures being treated as predictors.
Results: Digital data were successfully collected from both the wearables and smartphones throughout the study, with 91% of the total possible data successfully collected from the wearables and 82% from the smartphones during the first week of the trial-the period under analysis in this report. Among the clinical outcomes, negative symptoms were associated with the greatest number of digital measures (10 of the 12 studied here), followed by overall measures of psychopathology symptoms, functioning, and positive symptoms, which were each associated with at least 3 digital measures. Cognition and cognitive/disorganization symptoms were each associated with 1 or 2 digital measures.
Conclusions: We found significant associations between nearly all digital measures and a wide range of symptoms and functioning in a community sample of individuals with schizophrenia. These findings provide insights into the digital behaviors of individuals with schizophrenia and highlight the potential of using commercially available wrist wearables and smartphones for passive monitoring in schizophrenia.
Unlabelled: Cost savings were achieved with the use of a smartphone-based care management platform, considering several health care resources following knee arthroplasty procedures without negatively impacting clinical outcomes.
Background: HIV continues to be a public health concern in Mexico and Latin America due to an increase in new infections, despite a decrease being observed globally. Treatment adherence is a pillar for achieving viral suppression. It prevents the spread of the disease at a community level and improves the quality and survival of people living with HIV. Thus, it is important to implement strategies to achieve sustained treatment adherence.
Objective: The objective of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of a mobile health (mHealth) intervention based on SMS text messages to increase antiretroviral therapy (ART) adherence for HIV-positive adults.
Methods: A randomized controlled trial was performed at the Hospital Civil de Guadalajara - Fray Antonio Alcalde on HIV-positive adults who had initiated ART. The mHealth intervention included the use of SMS text messages as a reminder system for upcoming medical examinations and ART resupply to increase adherence. This intervention was provided to 40 participants for a 6-month period. A control group (n=40) received medical attention by the standard protocol used in the hospital. Intervention effectiveness was assessed by quantifying CD4+ T cells and viral load, as well as a self-report of adherence by the patient.
Results: The intervention group had greater adherence to ART than the control group (96% vs 92%; P<.001). In addition, the intervention group had better clinical characteristics, including a lower viral load (141 copies/mL vs 2413 copies/mL; P<.001) and a trend toward higher CD4+ T cells counts (399 cells/μL vs 290 cells/μL; P=.15).
Conclusions: These results show that an mHealth intervention significantly improves ART adherence. Implementing mHealth programs could enhance the commitment of HIV-positive adults to their treatment.
Background: There has been a surge in the development of apps that aim to improve health, physical activity (PA), and well-being through behavior change. These apps often focus on creating a long-term and sustainable impact on the user. Just-in-time adaptive interventions (JITAIs) that are based on passive sensing of the user's current context (eg, via smartphones and wearables) have been devised to enhance the effectiveness of these apps and foster PA. JITAIs aim to provide personalized support and interventions such as encouraging messages in a context-aware manner. However, the limited range of passive sensing capabilities often make it challenging to determine the timing and context for delivering well-accepted and effective interventions. Ecological momentary assessment (EMA) can provide personal context by directly capturing user assessments (eg, moods and emotions). Thus, EMA might be a useful complement to passive sensing in determining when JITAIs are triggered. However, extensive EMA schedules need to be scrutinized, as they can increase user burden.
Objective: The aim of the study was to use machine learning to balance the feature set size of EMA questions with the prediction accuracy regarding of enacting PA.
Methods: A total of 43 healthy participants (aged 19-67 years) completed 4 EMA surveys daily over 3 weeks. These surveys prospectively assessed various states, including both motivational and volitional variables related to PA preparation (eg, intrinsic motivation, self-efficacy, and perceived barriers) alongside stress and mood or emotions. PA enactment was assessed retrospectively via EMA and served as the outcome variable.
Results: The best-performing machine learning models predicted PA engagement with a mean area under the curve score of 0.87 (SD 0.02) in 5-fold cross-validation and 0.87 on the test set. Particularly strong predictors included self-efficacy, stress, planning, and perceived barriers, indicating that a small set of EMA predictors can yield accurate PA prediction for these participants.
Conclusions: A small set of EMA-based features like self-efficacy, stress, planning, and perceived barriers can be enough to predict PA reasonably well and can thus be used to meaningfully tailor JITAIs such as sending well-timed and context-aware support messages.