Well known biomarkers such as blood pressure, respiration, temperature, pulse, and pain are frequently used by physicians and other health professionals to describe a patient’s health and disease status. In addition to these ‘signs of life’, there is another important aspect of people’s health and disease status, namely their mobility – how well they walk. Loss of physical mobility, such as reduced walking speed, is a significant feature of many health conditions. Early detection of physical mobility loss is vital to initiate preventive actions against progression of disease and to avoid hospitalization.
The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the pressing need for tools to facilitate remote visits and mobility monitoring. What if we could use digital health technologies such as body worn devices to remotely measure and monitor disease status and provide outcomes that are meaningful to both patients and healthcare professionals? What if digital mobility outcomes (DMOs), such as walking speed, could be used as biomarkers just like the earlier mentioned blood pressure and temperature? A real world, continuous digital measure of mobility would bring a new dimension and novel insights into healthcare conditions and complement existing mobility measures. Accepted and approved DMOs are not yet available, and the need for large collaborative efforts to tackle the critical steps to adoption is widely recognized. This is exactly what the IMI initiative Mobilise-D is working on, through a multi-disciplinary consortium of 34 academic, medical and industry institutions that collaborate to address the critical steps for DMOs to be adopted in clinical trials and healthcare.
Mobilise-D coordinator Lynn Rochester and colleagues just published “A roadmap to inform development, validation and approval of digital mobility outcomes: the Mobilise-D approach” where they describe the approach taken by Mobilise-D. The ultimate aim of the Mobilise-D is to stimulate widespread adoption of DMOs through the provision of device-agnostic software, standards, and robust technical and clinical validation in order to bring digital outcomes from concept to use in clinical trials and healthcare. Check it out here!
