UTSW CDRC M-Health
medical tracking
- iOS/Android App Development
- UI/UX Strategy and Design
- Web Admin/Dashboard Portal
- Data Collection
- Data Visualization
- Phone Sensor Data Collection
- Support & Maintenance
- Security & HIPPA Compliance
The Client
UT Southwestern (UTSW) is one of the premier academic medical centers in the nation and integrates pioneering biomedical research with exceptional clinical care and education. The institution’s faculty includes many distinguished members, including six who have been awarded Nobel Prizes since 1985. The faculty of more than 2,800 is responsible for groundbreaking medical advances and is committed to translating science-driven research quickly to new clinical treatments.
As part of the Texas-Resilience Against Depression (T-RAD) program, the CDRC M-Health app collects multiple data streams from a user and offers tips and activities that encourage mindfulness and self-reflection. It also serves as a primary source of data for understanding how best to treat and reduce the risk of depression or mood disorders. The app features both passive and active data collection, daily surveys that measure and stabilize symptoms, and aggregates and analyzes the data. Due to the numerous sensors capturing often sensitive data, users must be invited to participate in this study and cannot access the app without clinician approval.
The Challenge
Depression is a very common mental health problem. Traditional methods of assessing depression, such as questionnaires filled out by the patient or a healthcare professional, have their own problems. Smartphones and other smart devices can give us a lot of information about our mental and physical health. This type of research, called mobile health, or mHealth, can measure how active we are, how well we sleep, how often we talk to others, and how we’re feeling. Combining this data with other studies, such as the T-RAD program, can help us learn more about how our brains are affected by depression and assess methods for early diagnosis and continuous monitoring.
Project Goals
- Provide Clinicians a way to investigate the feasibility of predicting depression human behaviors quantified from smartphone data sets and to help identify and develop digital biomarkers that can influence depression.
- Allow Clinicians ways to test various hypotheses, including, but not limited to:
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- Time spent home will be positively associated with current depressive symptoms.
- Step count will be negatively associated with current depressive symptoms.
- Sleep activity will be negatively associated with current depressive symptoms.
- Daily device usage will be positively associated with current depressive symptoms.
Our Solution
CDRC M-Health is a cutting-edge iOS and Android application complemented by a sophisticated web-based administrative portal. By harnessing comprehensive active and passive data, this app delivers a holistic view of individuals grappling with anxiety and depression. Through this singular platform, clinicians can delve into the behavioral patterns and contextual circumstances of these patients, enabling them to extract correlations and draw significant conclusions.
Users: Users must meet certain criteria in order to participate, including: aged 10-24 (with parental/guardian consent if under 18), any gender, any race/ethnicity, ability to speak and read in English, have a current or prior diagnosis of a mood disorder. Users are asked to use the mobile health application capturing passive and active data for a 3-month pilot period.
Data being collected: This app will capture both active and passive data. Active data includes information collected when the individual is using the app. Passive data includes information collected in the background even if the user is not using the app. All data is stored on TXRAMP certified servers, with access being restricted using Windows Domain accounts. Data collection includes both active and passive inputs. Active: 4 question survey, twice a day. Passive: Pedometer Data, Network Connections, Device Usage Reports, Text Message Usage Report, and Phone Usage Report.
App Technology: Falkon developed the app using Xamarin with pages for the user to view account information, access their personalized feed, view the recorded data and resources for depression.
- Learn shows the users customized content, tiles, and tips in the form of videos, images, and articles
- Feed is their home base. This is where they will find pushed activities, articles, and information sent from the administrators and clinicians.
- Data is where they can view all aggregated data being collecting in the form of charts and tables.
- Account contains their personal information and app settings.
Dashboard/Admin Features: A web-based administrative portal was designed for clinicians and medical data experts to manage the users app content. Clinicians can push new tips to users’ feeds, view and analyze user data, separately and aggregated, and set up new studies, add participants, and manage the tip library. Clinicians have a more extensive dashboard which aggregates, analyzes, and displays data collected from the users’ smartphone app.
UI: Because this app is not openly available to the public, we stuck with a very simple and intuitive interface, following the UTSW brand. We maintained UTSW’s color and type pairings but expanded the color palette to allow for additional colors to better differentiate and emphasize the data being shown.
The Outcome
The study successfully demonstrated the potential of mHealth technology in monitoring depression and providing valuable insights for early diagnosis. By combining passive and active data collection, the project is contributing to a more comprehensive understanding of depression’s impact on the brain and paved the way for future advancements in mental health research and clinician intervention. With its advanced analytics capabilities, CDRC M-Health presents a powerful tool for clinicians to better comprehend and manage mental health conditions, all while providing seamless integration within a unified ecosystem.
“Make a customer, not a sale…” This is something that I felt from the very beginning when working with the Falkon team. Customer experience is not just about the way you produce a high-quality product. It’s also about the way you treat your customers and Falkon has continued to be a pleasure to work with.
Sangita Sethuram UT Southwestern, Clinical Research Manager; CDRC
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