Mhealth app for head injury diagnosis receives nod from FDA

mobile health app news

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has now given clearance to this mobile application for traumatic brain injury identification.

The FDA has now given clearance to an mhealth app called the Defense Automated Neurobehavioral Assessment, which is a smartphone based application that is meant to offer medical providers with assistance in identifying situations in which traumatic brain injury may be present.

The mobile health app can be used in virtually any setting and could help in making a diagnosis very quickly.

As little as five minutes could be needed in order to be able to give clinicians the ability to diagnose a patient with a traumatic brain injury. According to Lt. Col. Chessley Atchison, who has been a part of the handling of prototypes that work with the mhealth app and who is the program manager for the Technology Enabled Capability Demonstration: Brain in Combat portfolio of the Combat Casualty Care Research Program, “This is what’s important right now.” Atchison added that “And once we get it right, we’re going to put it fairly far forward in the field.”

The mhealth application is being seen as a tool that could be exceptionally helpful for the military.

mhealth app newsAtchison described the Defense Automated Neurobehavioral Assessment (DANA) mobile health app as being somewhat similar to a kind of “brain thermometer.” The DANA application has been created to function in a way that is comparable to a video game. In order to use it, service members participate in a series of on-screen exercises in which their accuracy and speed are both tested. Service members who may have experienced a serious injury to their heads will then take part in a series of self-administered questionnaires and cognitive efficiency tests.

Once those are complete, the results are reviewed by a clinician. That medical professional will run a comparison of the new data with the baseline exercise data. The combination of the psychological and the cognitive elements of this new DANA mhealth app gives the clinician greater insight into the potential for symptoms that could be the result of post traumatic stress disorder or of traumatic brain injury.

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