Optimizing a Sensor-Enabled mHealth Intervention for Adolescents with Suboptimal Asthma Control

PROJECT SUMMARY Asthma affects 9% of adolescents in the United States and is a leading cause of youth morbidity. National asthma guidelines emphasize the importance of asthma self-management behaviors to control asthma and promote quality of life. Adolescents have suboptimal adherence to asthma self-management behaviors driven by an underdeveloped and highly variable capacity to self-regulate cognitions, emotions, and behaviors; and a normative decrease in parental support while multiple demands are increasing. Each adolescent experiences different threats to their ability to self-regulate at different moments in time, necessitating personalized and adaptive self-regulatory support to increase daily self-management behaviors and achieve sustained asthma control. Smartphones are an optimal mechanism for improving adolescent adherence, however, existing asthma self-management apps do not combine what is known about evidence-based behavior change strategies and adaptive intervention technologies that tailor the experience based on user data. Our team recently developed Responsive Asthma Care for Teens (ReACT; R56 HL141394), a technological ecosystem including a smartphone app, mobile sensors to assess medication dosing, a Smarthub to achieve real-time data listening, and cloud-based intervention delivery algorithms. ReACT provides personalized and adaptive self-regulatory support to improve asthma self-management via goal-setting, feedback, and barrier identification with problem-solving skills. Results of our pilot work demonstrated that ReACT was acceptable and produced post-intervention changes in our hypothesized mechanisms of self-regulation and problem- solving skills. The proposed study will optimize ReACT based on lessons learned from our pilot work and updated national asthma guidelines. We will conduct an unbalanced (2:1) randomized pilot trial to examine feasibility of our multisite trial protocol, determine if ReACT produces a clinically significant effect on proximal mechanisms hypothesized to drive asthma control, and explore the impact of ReACT on asthma control and asthma-related quality of life. Adolescents ages 13-17 with suboptimal asthma control (n=120) will be randomized to ReACT or a mHealth control condition stratified by regimen for 6-months. Adolescents in the control condition will receive an app that includes static asthma education information and a form for recording symptoms and adherence. The control condition is designed to mirror standard of care, optimize recruitment, and sustain interest while concurrently having a minimal impact on asthma management. Assessments will occur at baseline, 3-month, and post-intervention (6-month) time points. Mechanisms of intervention effect will be collected via both self-report (e.g., self-regulation) and objective (e.g., medication adherence) assessments. We will assess planned future clinical trial outcomes (e.g., asthma control and asthma-related quality of life) to provide effect size estimates for future work. We will have the necessary and sufficient information about the feasibility of our multisite clinical trial protocol and planned analyses at the end of this project.