Dr. Parisa Rashidi (PI), associate professor & J. Crayton Pruitt Family Term Fellow and researchers awarded NIH NIA R21 grant to develop a new smartwatch-enabled symptom surveillance platform that will facilitate post-surgical care management.

The proposed research can result in enhanced patient care workflow and early intervention, ultimately improving patient outcomes and decreasing healthcare costs and advancing technologies to provide real-time surveillance of post-discharge symptoms in surgical patients.

The team approach will represent the first attempt to (1) continuously monitor post-surgical symptoms in a free-living environment and (2) integrate PGHD data from wearable devices within the clinical workflow while providing comprehensive workflow, usability, and implementation guidelines.

In recent years, mobile health (mHealth) apps have promised improved monitoring of health conditions to improve clinical outcomes. While existing sensors and devices collect relevant patient information, such information is rarely shared with healthcare providers, potentially preventing timely interventions. Existing patient portals are typically static— they lack remote and real-time capabilities for monitoring symptoms, medication use, activity levels and community mobility. This is vital information for understanding how patients recover from surgical procedures— particularly for older adults who are highly vulnerable to poor recovery.

The objectives of this application are to 1) implement our existing Real-Time and Online Assessment and Mobility Monitor (ROAMM) smartwatch app platform into the electronic health record (EHR) to form the ROAMM-EHR platform and 2) test its feasibility in a pilot randomized clinical trial (RCT) in older patients (n= 50, >60 yrs.) discharged after orthopedic surgery in preparation for a definitive trial.

The approach is innovative, because it will represent the first effort to not only build and implement but also to formally test a real-time post-surgical symptom surveillance platform by integrating patient-generated health data from wearable devices with the EHR system.

Team members:

• Contact PI: Dr. Parisa Rashidi, Associate Professor & J. Crayton Pruitt Family Term Fellow, Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Florida
• Co-PI: Dr. Todd Manini (Co-PI), Professor; Chief, Division of EDGE, Department of Epidemiology, University of Florida
• Co-I: Dr. Chancellor Gray (Co-I), Associate Professor, Department of Orthopaedic Surgery and Sports Medicine, University of Florida
• Co-I: Dr. Jesse Dallery (Co-I), Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Florida
• Co-I: Dr. Jordan Alpert (Co-I), Assistant Professor, Department of Advertising, University of Florida
• Co-I: Dr. Matthew Gurka (Co-I), Professor, Department of Health Outcomes and Biomedical Informatics, University of Florida