Grant: Catalyst Grant: Personalized Health Catalyst Grants

Rheumatoid arthritis is a major cause of severe chronic pain and disability. To live well, people with rheumatoid arthritis need skills and support to manage their symptoms and treatment use, be physically active, and know when to seek help. But sometimes they struggle with interpreting their symptoms in relation to their treatment and daily activities. This makes it challenging for them to decide if and when to seek help from health professionals. We will develop and test a program with self-tracking technology to address this challenge. The program will include a mobile app for self-recording symptoms and treatment use. It will also be paired with a Fitbit wristband to automatically track physical activity levels and show them side-by-side with the self-recorded information such as pain, disease activity, fatigue, stiffness and stress level. This means patients will be able to see how their treatment and lifestyle affect the disease over periods of time. The app will send an automated prompt when there appears to be a disease flare based on their own recording. In the next two years this project will achieve three aims. First, we will partner with patients, health professionals and an e-health company to build and launch the app. Second, we will invite 15 patients with rheumatoid arthritis to help us test how well the app functions in a lab and in their own environment. Feedback will be used to refine the app and user instructions. Finally, we will recruit 60 patients to test how feasible it is for the program to be delivered in the community. We will assess if it shows promise of being successful to improve physical activity and health outcomes. This project will be a catalyst for a better understanding and future research in the use of self-tracking technology to support self-management. The connections of our team members will allow us to efficiently communicate the results to the public, health professionals and other researchers.