UNITI Mobile -- EMI-Apps for a Large-Scale European Study on Tinnitus

TL;DR

This paper presents the development and implementation of mobile apps for a large-scale European study on tinnitus, aiming to evaluate mobile technology's validity and usefulness in heterogeneous treatment contexts across countries.

Contribution

It introduces novel mobile intervention apps for tinnitus research and discusses their features and potential to enhance future mobile health studies in a European setting.

Findings

Development of two native intervention apps for UNITI study

Assessment of app features' validity and usefulness

Insights into cross-country differences in mobile health interventions

Abstract

More and more observational studies exploit the achievements of mobile technology to ease the overall implementation procedure. Many strategies like digital phenotyping, ecological momentary assessments or mobile crowdsensing are used in this context. Recently, an increasing number of intervention studies makes use of mobile technology as well. For the chronic disorder tinnitus, only few long-running intervention studies exist, which use mobile technology in a larger setting. Tinnitus is characterized by its heterogeneous patient's symptom profiles, which complicates the development of general treatments. In the UNITI project, researchers from different European countries try to unify existing treatments and interventions to cope with this heterogeneity. One study arm (UNITI Mobile) exploits mobile technology to investigate newly implemented interventions types, especially within the pan-European setting. The goals are to learn more about the validity and usefulness of mobile technology in this context. Furthermore, differences among the countries shall be investigated. Practically, two native intervention apps have been developed for UNITI and the mobile study arm, which pose features not presented so far in other apps of the authors. Along the implementation procedure, it is discussed whether these features might leverage similar types of studies in future. Since instruments like the mHealth evidence reporting and assessment checklist (mERA), developed by the WHO mHealth technical evidence review group, indicate that aspects shown for UNITI Mobile are important in the context of health interventions using mobile phones, our findings may be of a more general interest and are therefore being discussed in the work at hand.