A Pain Reporting Platform for Adolescents with Sickle-Cell Disease

This paper presents the latest version of the Pain Reporting and Management mHealth Platform for adolescent Sickle Cell Disease, developed in collaboration by Arizona State University and the Children’s National Health System. This platform supports a cross-platform mHealth app, reporting and task management API, and portal dashboard for care provider monitoring. Extending our prior work, the latest version adds enhanced app features (games, power-ups, badges, notifications) to promote sustained adherence to the reporting protocol, and enhanced reporting features for providers that track high fidelity compliance measures and aggregate outcome scores. This paper summarizes the architecture and principle features of the platform, and presents data supporting improved compliance

MHealth Games as Rewards: Incentive or Distraction?

Games may be employed for delivery of a clinical protocol, or as an incentive for protocol tasks. We focus on serious games in mHealth apps for pediatric patients with a chronic disease as an incentive for behavior modification. A patient is rewarded with enhanced gameplay in proportion to her/his compliance with a clinical protocol. The game-as-reward prevents fatigue and sustains patient engagement as the mHealth apps are used on a frequent basis when the affliction is a chronic disease. However, our experience shows a fine line between games that encourage engagement and ones that distract patients from protocol tasks