title: Patient use of smartphones to communicate subjective data in clinical trials.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  Various methods have been used in clinical trials to collect time-sensitive subjective responses, including study diaries, telephone interviews, and use of text messaging. However, all of these methods are limited by the uncertainty of when the participants enrolled in the study actually record their responses. This technical note reports on the utility of the BlackBerry smartphone to collect such data and why such a system provides advantages over other methods to report subjective ratings in clinical studies.
  
  
  METHODS
  The Centre for Contact Lens Research developed an on-line web-enabled system that permits participants to record and immediately transmit subjective rating scores in numerical form directly into a web-enabled database. This, combined with the utility of BlackBerrys, enabled time-specific e-mail requests to be sent to the study participants and then for that data to be simultaneously transmitted to the web-enabled database. This system has been used in several clinical trials conducted at the Centre for Contact Lens Research, in which data were collected at various times and in several specific locations or environments.
  
  
  RESULTS
  In the clinical trials conducted using this system, participants provided responses on 97.5% of occasions to the requests for data generated by the automated system. When the request was for data on a set date, this method resulted in responses of 84.1% of the time.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The series of clinical trials reported here show the benefits of the utilization of the BlackBerry to collect time- or environment-sensitive data via a web-enabled system.
authors.affiliation: Centre for Contact Lens Research, School of Optometry, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. cawoods@uwaterloo.ca
authors.forename: Craig A
authors.initials: CA
authors.lastname: Woods
authors.forename: Kathryn
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Dumbleton
authors.forename: Lyndon
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Jones
authors.forename: Desmond
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Fonn
mesh_terms: D040421:Cell Phone; D002986:Clinical Trials as Topic; D003625:Data Collection / Q000379:methods*; D019992:Databases as Topic; D034742:Electronic Mail; D006801:Humans; D020407:Internet; D010349:Patient Compliance; D010361:Patients; D012107:Research Design; D013685:Telecommunications