There are apps in use now that monitor drug use for psychiatric patients by trying to detect that a drug was ingested using a sensor inside the pill that can be detected with a patch placed on the abdomen. The patch is connected to the phone and reports back to doctors.
This itself had to be approved and has a number of ways it can be prone to errors and blow a trial by misreporting if it were used for one.
Generally, especially under the current circumstances for at-risk patients, there might be a push to do more electronic reporting for clinical trials. However, the requirement to have patients near a trial center isn't that bad, you don't have to be right next to it. But when patients drop out of trials it is very expensive to the company so reducing travel problems is important in addition to maintaining consistency.
> There are apps in use now that monitor drug use for psychiatric patients by trying to detect that a drug was ingested using a sensor inside the pill that can be detected with a patch placed on the abdomen. The patch is connected to the phone and reports back to doctors.
Do you have any more information about this please?
>> There are apps in use now that monitor drug use for psychiatric patients by trying to detect that a drug was ingested using a sensor inside the pill that can be detected with a patch placed on the abdomen
Wouldn't that be easily fooled by just pressing the pill against your abdomen for a while, and then throwing it away?
Or sticking it with a piece of duct tape?
Seems like this solutions kind of assumes that all pshychiatric patients are stupid.
That particular way of gaming it won't work. The sensor inside the pill is a tiny logic circuit that transmits a signal throughout the patient's body. The current comes from basically building a battery out of the patient's stomach with the polar molecules in hydrochloric acid. The current contains some data and the worn patch detects the tiny sine wave.
It would be difficult to game this but it is still possible. The app itself could be broken for example.
I think the FDA approval for this device assumes the patient actually takes the medicine so no guarantees are made if the patient doesn't.
To tie this to my point, adding in electronic reporting and measuring opens up a number of possible ways of getting false data during a trial so I think it would be difficult to manage that. For example, in oncology trials, monitoring for adverse events and cancer progression might involve blood draws for analysis and maybe a monthly progression scan. These types of things are much easier controlled at a central location. Although not all trials are the same and electronic monitoring and reporting seems to have a lot of potential for drug usage and trials.
This itself had to be approved and has a number of ways it can be prone to errors and blow a trial by misreporting if it were used for one.
Generally, especially under the current circumstances for at-risk patients, there might be a push to do more electronic reporting for clinical trials. However, the requirement to have patients near a trial center isn't that bad, you don't have to be right next to it. But when patients drop out of trials it is very expensive to the company so reducing travel problems is important in addition to maintaining consistency.