Abstract

Background: Compliance rates for mobile health (mHealth) studies that involve intensive study designs are highly variable. Both person- and study-specific factors likely contribute to this variability. We were interested in understanding the impact that care partner characteristics and demographics have on study engagement, given that engagement is critical to the success of mHealth interventions.

Objective: The primary objective of this report was to analyze the overall and component-specific completion and compliance rates for an intensive 6-month mHealth intervention (CareQOL app) designed to promote self-awareness and self-care among care partners of individuals with traumatic brain injury.

Methods: This randomized controlled trial was designed to test the CareQOL app, an mHealth app designed to promote care partner self-awareness (through self-monitoring) and self-care (through personalized self-care push notifications). The study design consisted of a baseline assessment, a 6-month home monitoring period that included three daily ecological momentary assessment (EMA) questions, monthly patient-reported outcome (PRO) surveys, continuous activity and sleep monitoring using a Fitbit, and two follow-up PRO surveys at 3 and 6 months posthome monitoring. Three participants withdrew prior to the initiation of the home-monitoring period, resulting in a final analytical sample size of 254. All participants had access to a self-monitoring dashboard (CareQOL app) that included graphical displays of the daily survey scores, as well as daily steps and sleep data from the Fitbit.

Results: Overall compliance for the different aspects of the study was high. On average, the full-sample daily EMA PROs completion rate was 84%, Fitbit-based step count compliance was 90%, and Fitbit-based sleep duration compliance was 75%; there was no difference between the study arms for daily EMA PROs and Fitbit compliance rates. Completion rates for monthly and follow-up PRO surveys were even higher, with average end-of-month completion rates ranging from 97% to 100%, and follow-up completion rates of 95% for both time points. Again, these rates did not differ by study arm. The data were represented by three engagement groups: high-compliance group-all data, high-compliance group-PROs and steps only, and moderate PRO compliance—low Fitbit compliance. Group membership was predicted by both race (P<.001) and relationship to the care recipient (P=.001), but not by the other person-specific variables.

Conclusions: The compliance rates for this intensive study design are consistent, but at the high end, with what has been reported previously in the literature for studies with shorter time durations. Except for race and relationship to the care recipient, person-specific factors did not appear to be significantly associated with the engagement group. As such, we anticipate that the high compliance rates observed in this study are likely due to several study-specific design elements that were used to encourage study engagement.

Trial Registration: ClinicalTrial.gov NCT04570930

Keywords: caregivers; mobile apps; self-care; ecological momentary assessment; quality of life