From self-reporting to monitoring for improved migraine management

Migraine affects around 18% of the population and is considered one of the most disabling conditions with a great socio-economic impact. Many therapeutic decisions in the management of migraine patients are almost entirely dependent on the patient’s accurate recollection of headache events and associated circumstances that have occurred between visits. Therefore, today’s solutions to improve the traditional interview at each physician visit exist of self-reporting systems, either paper-based or using one of the available smartphone apps. This way, patients manually record clinical and related events on the day they occur, such that possible headache triggers in the lifestyle of the patient can be discussed. However, self-reporting all lifestyle events is cumbersome and subjective. To overcome these issues, we have developed mBrain, a migraine app that automatically records activities, sleeping behavior and stress. mBrain also allows patients to record their personal feelings, migraine attacks and medication intake on a day-to-day basis. This way, mBrain enables a shift from sporadic self-reporting towards continuous and objective monitoring. To further optimize the migraine management, we also designed a dashboard for clinicians that uses semantic reasoning. The dashboard visualizes the optimal information to treat the patient without requiring any configuration. This allows physicians to have a more detailed and objective view on the patient, relevant clinical events, and the patient’s response to the treatment, thus aiding physicians with posing pertinent questions. The time physicians used to spend on uncovering the relevant history from the memory of the patients can now be used to diagnose the patients more quickly and optimize their treatments, paving the path towards improved migraine management and personalized migraine therapies.

Publication year:2022

Accessibility:Open