A mobile assessment technology for schizophrenia

Schizophrenia is a severe, often lifelong disorder which affects 1% of people with an onset in early adult life. New, effective treatments are needed. Developing these is slow, partly because of the blunt measurement instruments we have for assessing symptoms and outcomes. We are proposing a new approach to measuring symptoms based on collecting data on symptom severity several times a day using an adapted mobile phone. We wish to evaluate how well this works in comarison to standard methods, and how acceptable patients find it to use in everyday life. If successful, this offers a new way to evaluate treatments and outcomes, and could in the longer term be used routinely by patients, with clinical staff, monitoring their own health in the community.

Schizophrenia is a major public health challenge. Current treatments are limited and, in the absence of reliable markers of disease or of treatment response, evaluation of new treatments is cumbersome. Treatments are evaluated by patient recall of symptoms a week or month later, a process subject to averaging and biased recollection. The aim of the proposal is to develop and evaluate a web-based remote data capture system for recording momentary symptom data in ambulant subjects, based on a technique know as experience sampling (ES). The objectives are (i) to examine the validity of ES data collected via handheld PDA against gold standard conventional rating scale clinical assessments currently used in treatment evaluation; (ii) to develop a wireless version of ES to streamline the collection and collation of clinical data during daily life using a mobile phone; (ii) to compare the acceptability and efficiency of this system to the PDA-based ES system. If successful, this method of capturing data will be relevant to new clinical trial designs and new modes of service delivery. Roll out of the end product will be in conjunction with with the GSM Association (www.gsmworld.com), which represents the interests of the worldwide mobile communications industry.