Emerging technologies show great potential in the field of patient care. One such technology is mobile heath applications (mhealth apps), which have exploded in number and variety in recent years, and offer great promise in the ability to collect and monitor patient health data. Despite their apparent success in proliferation and user adoption, these applications struggle to integrate into the primary care system and there is scant information regarding their efficacy to effect patient behavior and consequently health outcomes. In this paper we investigate the potential of a promising clinical evaluation methodology, response adaptive randomized clinical trials, to rapidly and effectively evaluate the efficacy and effectiveness of mhealth apps and to personalize mhealth app selection to individualize patient benefit. Diabetes prevention provides the use case for evaluating the case for and against response-adaptive randomized trials.
Keywords: Adaptive Clinical Trials; Diabetes Prevention; Mobile Health Applications; RCT; evaluation; mhealth apps; randomized controlled trials.