Mobile health platform shows promise in patients with kidney stones

In this video, Jenny Guo, MD, shares the take-home message from the 2024 American Urological Association Annual Meeting abstract, “Development of a novel mobile health platform for surveillance of kidney stone formers: 6-month preliminary analysis.” Guo is a urology resident at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

Transcription:

What is the take-home message for the practicing urologist?

I would say the take-home message is that usage of this mobile health platform could potentially improve patient quality of life and compliance with recommendations. However, it does appear that most of the participants in our study tended to be younger or very highly motivated to use mobile health technology to prevent future stone recurrences. And we did see a pretty low recruitment and higher dropout rates than expected. So that may also point toward the fact that patients may value in-person follow-up and just prefer to see somebody face to face. So we definitely need some further studies to refine this technology and to see if it will really be useful. It'd be interesting to see in 10 to 20 years down the line if there's a shift in attitude toward usage of mobile health technology in prevention of stones.

Is there anything you would like to add?

I always want to emphasize that kidney stones are very common in the US. They occur in about 1 out of 10 to 11 people, and patients who have 1 stone oftentimes will have a recurrence; 1 in 5 will have a recurrence, so it's always important to continue doing research to prevent stones in the future.

This transcription was edited for clarity.