Oct-2020
Hamilton Health Sciences develops smartphone app to help concussion patients
A Hamilton Health Sciences team has developed an innovative smartphone application that will soon help patients manage the effects of concussions on their daily lives.
The MyHeadHealth mobile app will provide concussion patients with a personalized treatment plan, instructional videos, educational tools and a way for them to input information on their health and symptoms.
The data can be accessed by a medical team at HHS’ integrated adult concussion clinic at Hamilton General Hospital so they can track the progress and compliance of patients with their treatment programs and adjust them as needed.
“I think the biggest gap, as I look at the landscape, is that a lot of patients are just not well supported in their recoveries,” said Jeremy Petch, director of HHS’ Centre for Data Science and Digital Health and one of the concussion app’s creators.
“What this app does — and it’s really different from the way our health-care system operates — is that it’s really about providing patients with the supports to take control of their own recovery,” Petch said.
The app was the idea of Dr. Gihan Perera, a physiatrist and rehabilitation specialist at HHS’ Regional Rehabilitation Centre, which provides specialized care to patients recovering from a variety of conditions including traumatic brain injuries.
“We can give them all the information and we can educate them during the clinical appointment but then they’re kind of lost on where to go from there,” said Perera. “We want them to have that treatment plan accessible to them so it’s easy to use and they can do it in a self-directed manner.”
Once they’ve satisfied a number of security and privacy concerns related to patient data, the team expects to roll out the app in early 2021 with a bare-bones version just for use at the HHS clinic. They hope to register about 500 patients during the first year through referrals from emergency departments and family doctors, and they’ll get feedback from patients using the app to see what needs to be added or tweaked.
Read the full Hamilton Spectator article here