New York City, Feb 29, 2016: TrialX announced the launch of America Walks, a mobile based research study app to determine the walking behavior of Americans. The entire study is being conducted virtually by requiring participants to download a mobile phone app that is available for both iOS and Android phones. The App will leverage the mobile phone’s step count sensor technology to automatically determine participants’ daily walking activity, thus being the first research study to measure such activity using mobile phones, instead of self reported surveys, pedometers or tracking devices.
The study also breaks new ground by being the first mobile app based study to be available on both iOS and Android devices. The America Walks App has been built using Apple’s ResearchKit Library but the team at TrialX has also ported the same for Android devices so that the app is available to a much larger population base.
“At TrialX, building solutions that connect patients to clinical trials has been our founding mission, but with mobile apps, we are now exploring a truly unprecedented opportunity to expand the scope of clinical research. Apple’s ResearchKit has certainly created significant activity in this area but the limited availability of ResearchKit to iOS devices only, is a critical barrier in conducting studies with a more representative population sample. So we started work on an Android port of ResearchKit, releasing an the open source library in Aug 2015 and have extended it further for developing America Walks”, explained Chintan Patel, PhD, the Principal Investigator of the study and also the Co-founder and CTO of TrialX Inc.
The America Walks study will begin Mar 1st 2016 and will continue for four months. Participants will be able to complete the entire process of screening, consent, completing a demographic survey and providing access to their step count data via the app itself. Participants will be expected to participate in the study for 30 days, during which the app will passively track their step counts, with due consent from the participants.
With America Walks, TrialX hopes to make it easy and engaging for consumers to participate in research studies by making them available via mobile apps and by conducting studies that are related to health and wellness in general. In a paradigm shift, TrialX will also make the study data available in real time to all participants (and publicly) denoting aggregate statistics on how much people are walking across different demographic categories and a leaderboard displaying a ranking of states based on average daily steps walked by participants in that state.
Download iOS and Android App: https://trialx.com/americawalksstudy/
About TrialX
TrialX (https://trialx.com) is a clinical research informatics company based out of NYC. Started in 2008 by two Columbia University graduates, TrialX built the first clinical trials application to match patients to clinical trials using their personal health record information. TrialX’s online patient recruitment and clinical trials finders are used at leading academic medical centers and the company continues to push the envelope of innovation with launch of mobile based research studies and other consumer-centric applications. Learn more about developing cross-platform ResearchKit apps: https://trialx.com/researchkit
For any media enquiries, please email priya@trialx.com (Ph: 212-537-6944)
