Schools receive RWJF grants to develop mobile apps for chronic disease

Three California universities have received research grants from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to study methods of capturing "patient observations of daily living" on mobile and wireless devices and then integrate that data into chronic-disease care.

San Francisco State University has received a two-year, $480,000 grant to capture data on smartphones about low-income teenagers in areas with high rates of obesity and depression, while the University of California, Irvine, is teaming up with Charles Drew University, also in Irvine, to develop a mobile device for recording data on interactions between premature infants with low birth weights and their caregivers, the San Francisco Business Times reports. The team at UC-Irvine and Charles Drew will share the $480,000 grant.

"Data from ODLs (observations of daily living) can drive apps that help people eat better, manage their pain more effectively and understand how their behaviors, their treatments and their symptoms are related," the foundation's Stephen Downs says, according to the Business Times. "In addition, they can give clinicians a much richer understanding of what goes on with their patients in between office visits and then they can base their treatment recommendations on better, more comprehensive information."

Three other groups received RWJF grants for similar research not specifically involving mobile technologies.

For more:
- read this San Francisco Business Times story

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