Dixon, WG;
Beukenhorst, AL;
Yimer, BB;
Cook, L;
Gasparrini, A;
El-Hay, T;
Hellman, B;
... McBeth, J; + view all
(2019)
How the weather affects the pain of citizen scientists using a smartphone app.
npj Digital Medicine
, 2
, Article 105. 10.1038/s41746-019-0180-3.
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Abstract
Patients with chronic pain commonly believe their pain is related to the weather. Scientific evidence to support their beliefs is inconclusive, in part due to difficulties in getting a large dataset of patients frequently recording their pain symptoms during a variety of weather conditions. Smartphones allow the opportunity to collect data to overcome these difficulties. Our study Cloudy with a Chance of Pain analysed daily data from 2658 patients collected over a 15-month period. The analysis demonstrated significant yet modest relationships between pain and relative humidity, pressure and wind speed, with correlations remaining even when accounting for mood and physical activity. This research highlights how citizen-science experiments can collect large datasets on real-world populations to address long-standing health questions. These results will act as a starting point for a future system for patients to better manage their health through pain forecasts.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | How the weather affects the pain of citizen scientists using a smartphone app |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1038/s41746-019-0180-3 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1038/s41746-019-0180-3 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © The Author(s) 2019. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons. org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences > Dept of Statistical Science |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10084990 |
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