Objective: To describe a large health care organization’s process to develop a Parkinson’s Disease (PD) smartphone application (app) to provide individualized care to patients.

Background: PD symptoms and medication effects fluctuate throughout a patient’s day. Patients can experience impaired motor coordination, gait disturbances, and falls. Wearable technology can capture objective movement data continuously and passively; however, how the data can be used by neurologists and PD patients in a clinically meaningful fashion remains an area of active research. Sutter Health, a large health care organization in northern California, is developing an app to capture smartwatch data and measure movement, exercise, and medication adherence among patients with PD. We assess the feasibility of developing the app and explore how the data can be clinically meaningful to improve individualized PD care.

Method: We describe Sutter Health’s steps to successfully deploy the app: develop a research protocol; draft technical specifications; create wireframes with Figma [figure1]; collaborate with privacy, security, and legal teams [figure2]; design the data flow [figure3]; partner with a developer; iterate and approve the final design and go-live; and analyze the data.

Results: A team of Sutter Health researchers, data scientists, and a neurologist collaborated on this project. Case report forms capture participant characteristics, clinical diagnoses, treatment data, patient diaries and questionnaires, feasibility outcomes, and user experience surveys. In parallel, the research and data team drafted the app’s technical specifications and developed the wireframes in Figma. After reviewing three bids, one developer agency was chosen to develop the app, build a web portal for data review, design the data analytics, and obtain digital storage space. Sutter Health’s privacy and security teams vetted the proposals and security architecture; the legal team helped with the contract.

Conclusion: It is feasible for a health care organization to develop an app that collects and analyzes PD data with the goal to provide individualized patient care. The next phase of the study will be to enroll 30 participants with PD to obtain feedback on acceptability and usability, as well as collect initial quantitative data.

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MDS Abstracts - https://www.mdsabstracts.org/abstract/developing-a-smartphone-application-to-capture-objective-smartwatch-passive-and-continuous-data-to-individualize-parkinsons-disease-patient-care/