The goal of the research is to determine the impact of fitness and nutrition on healthy aging adults.
Global leader in cloud-based solutions for life sciences clinical research, Medidata, has now partnered with Nestlé in order to be able to conduct a large scale mobile health clinical trial on the healthy aging population.
Nestlé will be using the Medidata cloud technology platform and unified mhealth solutions to conduct its research.
The mobile health research is being held in China and will be conducted over a period of two years as an intervention study. The purpose will be to gauge the impact of physical activity and nutrition on the mobility of healthy aging adults who have already been diagnosed with various forms of joint discomforts. Nestlé’s head of clinical operations, Stephan Collet, explained that “The research program, developed in collaboration with dedicated experts from Nestlé research centers in Lausanne and Beijing, is extending Medidata and Nestlé Clinical Development Unit’s well-established relationship beyond traditional clinical trials.”
The mobile health study is using a number of device and cloud-based tools to collect, aggregate and analyze data.
The use of mhealth technology is making it possible to be able to collect more data from the participants in this research than has ever been available to Nestlé in its studies, said Collet. With that data, the company is able to obtain a larger amount of insight into the results of using the company’s nutritional products and the way in which they may be “improving people’s quality of life”.
The head of the Clinical Development Unit at Nestlé, Dr. Rafael Crabbe went on to explain that the study has provided his unit with “new insights into the optimal design and execution of clinical trials”. He pointed out that through the use of the Clinical Cloud from Medidata, the company feels more confident in the quality and appropriateness of the collection, storage and analysis of the subject data.
Subjects as a part of this mobile health study have been provided with vivofit activity trackers from Garmin. It was initially launched in May 2015 and brings together a physical activity program along with the consumption of a nutrition product from the company.
