TiM telehealth in MND study

This is a randomised controlled mixed methods pilot study of telehealth in motor neurone disease.  We are recruiting patients who are cared for by the Sheffield Motor Neurone Disease Care and Research Clinic at the Royal Hallamshire Hospital.  We’ve currently recruited 29 patients plus 26 carers to our study, half of which are using the telehealth system which sends weekly reports about their condition to the Sheffield care centre.  We hope to recruit a total of 40 patients by the Autumn of 2015 and the study will continue until Spring 2016.  So far the study is going well with some early positive feedback from those using the telehealth system.

As part of this project we are also conducting interviews and surveys with patients and their families exploring how they use technology and gain information about MND. The study is running over this summer as part of an MSc project at Sheffield Institute for Translational Neuroscience.  

If you have MND or are a close friend or family member of someone with MND and live in the UK you can help us with this project by completing an online survey by clicking here.  You can find out more about these projects on this website.

The TiM system uses a touch screen tablet computer to ask a series of questions about patients’ and carers’ current condition. The information will be sent back to Sheffield for analysis.

The telehealth intervention was developed with collaboration with the Telehealth and Care Technologies (TaCT) theme of CLAHRC YH, Sheffield Institute for Translational Neurosciences and Mylan, a pharmaceutical company.  The pilot study is funded by a National Institute for Health Research doctoral fellowship grant and a Motor Neurone Disease Association research grant. 

Written by Dr Esther Hobson