Janssen taps Daman to develop app for psoriatic arthritis trial
Daman, a Danish digital healthcare company, has been selected by Janssen to develop an app to collect patient-reported outcomes (PROs) in a psoriatic arthritis study. The company previously developed RheumaBuddy, an app for Apple and Android devices that is designed to help rheumatoid arthritis patients self-manage their disease; the new app will use the RheumaBuddy concept to enable Janssen to collect data on patients enrolled in a psoriatic arthritis clinical trial.
“The app will capture patient-reported outcomes for assessing psoriatic arthritis’ impact on patients in everyday life. We will use validated PROs, and moreover continuously capture data points such as mood, fatigue, itchiness, stiffness, by patient assessment, and sleep and activity, automatically captured with the use of a medically-validated smartwatch,” said a spokesperson for Daman.
Through the app, Daman aims to provide patients with a valuable tool and Janssen with a way to obtain longitudinal data-driven insights on the lives of the people living with psoriatic arthritis who enroll in the clinical trial.
Clinical trial sponsors have used PROs to capture insights into aspects of the lives of patients such as mood, fatigue, itchiness, and stiffness for years. However, site-based data capture has limitations that the app is intended to address.
“Studies have shown that ‘biases’ are present when asking patients to fill out PROs while in the clinic, and this concept is referred to as ecological momentary assessment. Moreover, we are able to capture PROs more frequently, thereby increasing the depth of insights into patients’ everyday life. Applied in a clinical trial, this can both lead to deeper data-driven understanding of patients' lives, and reveal different outcomes on everyday life between different treatments,” said the spokesperson.
The spokesperson cited the fact in-app PROs are “very cost-efficient” and have “high accuracy” as other advantages of the technology.
Jan Koren, president at EUROPSO, the federation of psoriasis patients’ associations in Europe, has taken part in the co-creation process. The aim has been to create an app that works for patients with psoriatic arthritis, a condition that affects 5m people in Europe and causes physical and psychological impacts that negatively affect quality of life.
