In a paper published in Frontiers in Physiology, co-authored by Professor Wan-Fai Ng, the NIHR Newcastle BRC's co-theme lead for Musculoskeletal Disease and Inflammation Medicine, researchers used wearable devices to measure and record fatigue and sleep patterns in such patients to see how effective the technology could be.
The research is part of the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) IDEA-FAST project, which aims to use digital technology to improve the efficiency of clinical trials. IDEA-FAST builds on the success of the NIHR Newcastle BRC-funded TOOLS study.
triIDEA-FAST is led by Professor Ng, who is also honorary consultant rheumatologist at Newcastle Hospitals and professor of rheumatology in the Translational and Clinical Research Institute at Newcastle University.
One of the common side effects of chronic diseases such as Parkinson’s disease, inflammatory bowel disease and rheumatoid arthritis are problems with fatigue and disturbed sleep. Among patients with these diseases, fatigue is often rated as one of the most disabling symptoms, affecting their daily activities and their quality of life.
Despite this, monitoring these symptoms often relies on simply asking patients to fill in a questionnaire about their experiences. This method can be affected by patients misremembering things and not having enough detail about the intensity of their fatigue throughout the day.
One way to provide more accurate and reliable results is for chronic disease patients to wear small devices to monitor these physiological signals throughout the day.
Professor Ng said: “There’s an increasing number of articles all pointing towards fatigue being one of the biggest, if not the biggest factor, leading to a loss of quality of life in these patients."
He added that although the paper represents an early pilot study, it shows that digital technologies can give clinicians realistic information when monitoring patients at home, differentiate chronic patients from healthy individuals, and monitor their quality of life.
He believes that studying fatigue and disturbed sleep could be the first step in creating a ‘digital biomarker’ for these symptoms that are relevant to many chronic diseases and that future research will be able to monitor additional physiological measures with a larger group of participants over a longer study period.
IDEA-FAST is supported by the Innovative Medicines Initiative, a partnership between the European Union and the European pharmaceutical industry
Read the full paper in Frontiers in Physiology
This article has been adapted from the original on the IMI website