Grant: CIHR Fellowship

Internet-enabled mobile technologies are increasingly being incorporated into the healthcare of Canadians. These "mHealth" tools can be used to improve disease monitoring, patient education, and enhance communication between patients and healthcare practitioners. mHealth may be particularly useful in helping to address the needs of older patients, such as medication assistance, and disease self-management and monitoring. However, there are important barriers preventing mHealth from effectively reaching older patients, including decreased access to technology, and sub-optimal usability of current mHealth tools among older patients. These concerns are particularly relevant to a disease like asthma, which affects 8.3% of Canadians and is growing in prevalence in older adults. While the development and use of mHealth tools is also growing in asthma care, little is currently known about the best ways to design and use these tools for older patients with asthma. The goal of my proposed research is to better understand how older patient age affects the use of mHealth tools in asthma. To accomplish this, I am proposing three connected research projects. First, I will analyze a study that tested an asthma mHealth tool in 2 family practice clinics, in order to determine how older patient age affected the use of the tool. Next, I will carry out an extensive literature review looking to better understand how other researchers have considered older patient age when they developed and tested respiratory mHealth tools. Finally, I will conduct and analyze in-depth patient interviews with older patients with asthma in order to understand their perspectives and experiences using mHealth tools. My work will help respiratory mHealth researchers better understand how mobile technologies are used in older patients with respiratory disease, and may identify ways in which current and future tools can be changed to make them more accessible and usable for older adults.