Cohort looks for cardiovascular information from One million volunteers

More than 100,000 volunteers have agreed to donate their cardiovascular information to assist researchers to better understand, predict and stop heart disease.

Finally, the aim of the Health eHeart Study is to protect at least one million participants and to leverage the power of web and mobile technology to collect data through devices like smartphone apps. Anyone age 18 and older with an active email address is eligible for the global research, and individuals from around the world are already participating.

Researchers at the institute of University of California-San Francisco got a $9.75 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to establish a digital platform—called Eureka—that is both app- and web-based and whose intention is to connect researchers with volunteers internationally for the Health eHeart Study.

“We will invite participants to merge with the Eureka community, which will also involve investigators and people interested in healthcare implementation,” claims Gregory Marcus, MD, a UC San Francisco Health cardiologist and director of clinical research in the UCSF Division of Cardiology.

A virtual infrastructure that taps into the Internet and smartphone technology is the concentration of the initiative, which Marcus asserts can be conveniently scaled and is more cost effective. “A charge of the NIH grant is to make the platform economically sustainable,” he adds. “The target is to develop the infrastructure that lives on for decades to come.”

The overall goal of Health eHeart is to collect more data about heart health or cardiovascular information from more individuals than any research study has done before. Marcus claims that the research is compliant with HIPAA security guidelines, and that the information is transmitted, stored and processed in a protective environment.

Mobile apps will be utilized to trace participant activity or heart measures, like heart rate, while sensors will measure physical factors, such as ECGs, sleep, blood pressure and weight. Additionally, an app will integrate with Facebook to study the affect of social networking on health, while other data gathering will involve collection of DNA, visits to study sites (e.g., UCSF) to get specialized cardiovascular information testing, as well as online surveys.

Among the queries the cohort is seeking to answer: Can technology be used to establish ways to make better cardiovascular information health and rigorously test them to evaluate their effects on health? And, can mobile technology and sensors be used to keep individuals with heart failure out of the hospital?

Toward that end, an initial assessment by UCSF researchers indicates that location-tracking apps on smartphones could be used to assist monitor and manage care for thousands of sufferers who suffer from chronic diseases like heart disease. The app, established by mHealth vendor Ginger.io in collaboration with study investigators, was designed to track known hospital visits.

“Ascertainment of hospitalizations and cardiovascular events is crucial to assess disease occurrence, quality of care and the effectiveness and adverse impacts of various therapies,” claims a paper released previous week in the American Heart Association journal Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes. “Smartphone-based geofencing, a location-based program that defines geographical boundaries, might permit real-time tracking of medical visits and decrease the measurement error of retrospective reporting.”

Tracking hospitalizations via smartphone-based geofencing is crucial because sufferer recollection is unreliable and can be biased, in accordance to Marcus. In the research, the app was discovered to be 65% accurate in identifying when someone was in a hospital and how long they stayed. The precision of app-detected hospitalizations was confirmed by medical record review as the reference standard.

“The accuracy was moderate,” summarizes Marcus. “Under the NIH award, we’re almost done building our own app, and we are going to take several lessons learned from this project. We’ll be executing it in future research from our own homegrown mobile app. With the app that we are building, we’ve few strategies in mind to make it more accurate.”