Intelligent mHealth Research Study Solution
AI-driven patient mobile connected health solution that improves participation, accuracy and completeness of research studies seeking to identify markers in facial, verbal and written expression that may be indicators for behavioral health disorders.
The Challenge
A clinical-stage neurobehavioral health company pioneering Artificial Intelligence technologies to treat brain disorders looked to NewPage to provide much-needed innovative technologies to improve behavioral health screening and data analysis. The client plans to bring new therapies to patients by applying new advances in computational sciences and data-driven approaches to address patient heterogeneity, one of the biggest challenges in the field of neuropsychiatric drug development. The client required a research study tool to develop patient behavior and mental health observations through questionnaires and audio/video recordings.
The Approach
The client approached NewPage because of our knowledge and experience in helping to unleash AI’s transformative power in healthcare. Key solution requirements included: tracking the patient’s face during the entire recording process to ensure it remained in the center of the camera frame; providing smooth and secure streaming of video and audio from icloud storage; the web portal for data scientists would allow fast forwarding/rewinding to a specific time and play/pause feature to allow them to monitor and analyze all recordings and associated metadata; the solution would enable the reading of large amounts of JSON data, calculate individual and cumulative scores for all activities and present details in a precise and simple format. The biggest challenge that was overcome was maintaining camera frame previews and ensuring undropped frames during the A/V recording process to prevent any loss of quality in the audio and video. For optimal streaming of the A/V files, we reviewed many open source media streaming servers on scalability, speed, support for media file types and security.
The Results
Utilizing our experience in digital health solutions leveraging the latest emerging technologies, NewPage presented a solution consisting of a mobile app, backend solutions and cloud technologies that helped the client launch their program on time. The solution collects patient behavioral and mental health observation data via video (continuous face tracking) and audio recording as the patient answers a predefined set of questions. The data scientist team can then analyze the data through the secure portal that offers major functionalities: graphs and charts to visualize data, and filters to optimize metadata search. Data scientists can gain AI-based insights to help identify anxious and depressive behaviors in participants that can facilitate the recommendation of treatments and drug development. The app is an independent component that can be integrated into other systems.
“As strategic technology partner, NewPage solutions brought deep technical expertise to accelerate development of key digital apabilities including development of cloud-based computational psychiatry and data platform and various other digital health mobile applications.”
