Kantar Health, a leading global healthcare consulting and market research firm, has partnered with Lumi Technologies to create a mobile survey application that leverages the ubiquity of smartphones and growth and innovations in mobile health (mHealth) technology to gain greater insights into the patient experience.
The Kantar Health mobile app can be used to conduct short surveys of up to 15 minutes, collect picture and video content, and passively collect biometric and activity data from a wide range of mHealth and wearable devices. Other features of the app include barcode scanning, voice-to-text audio capture, categorical and multiple response questions, and GPS/location capture.
“Mobile-enabled market research enables Kantar Health to capture patient insights around events as close to the ‘moment of experience’ as possible, whether that experience is a bout of nausea, pain attack or doctor/patient consultation,” said Brian Mondry, Global Head of Digital Innovation at Kantar Health. “Mobile also enables Kantar Health to gather rich, emotional data in the form of pictures and video by leveraging smartphone camera features, allowing for a more resonant view into patient experience.”
The Kantar Health mobile survey app will allow clients to address key business questions and issues, including:
• Patient journey
• Medication adherence and compliance
• Product usage experience
• Health outcomes
In addition, the app will facilitate key research objectives, such as in-the-moment feedback on specific patient or caregiver events, as well as longitudinal engagements and the ability to engage the same respondents multiple times during the course of a year. While the app will leverage physical activity, sleep and gait data from wearable fitness trackers, Kantar Health also will be able to collect and analyze biometric data such as blood glucose, BMI, blood pressure, heart rate, stress-levels and more as mHealth technology continues to evolve in terms of functionality that helps patients manage chronic health conditions.
“The growth and advances in mHealth technology create an opportunity to passively collect accurate biometric data from mHealth devices and applications,” Mondry said. “The activity and biometric data alone get us to the ‘what’: What is going on inside a person’s body? What is their sleep pattern? But we need to also ask questions to get to the ‘why’ if we are to identify the levers that influence attitudes, behaviors and outcomes.
Our app allows us to combine biometric data with data collected actively through surveys and pictures to get a more holistic view of the healthcare consumer to identify the ‘why.’”Mobile devices today have so many advanced sensors built in and by utilizing these as well as third party APIs, such as Fitbit, we can accurately capture respondents movements and habits. “Utilizing Apple Research Kit on iOS devices opens up the eco system of services that Apple has developed for healthcare research, in many cases it can completely replace third party integrations and gives us a huge pool of data that the respondents can give s access to” said, Marcus Wikars CTO of Lumi Technologies
