MyHeadache: an intelligent headache diary mobile application to enhance patient compliance

Although there are already some mobile headache diaries in the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store, motivating patients to keep headache diaries and improving patient compliance with mobile headache diaries remain major challenges. We designed a variety of functions to improve patient compliance and developed a mobile application (MyHeadache). MyHeadache includes a variety of functions, such as intelligent auxiliary diagnosis, personalized pain relief suggestions and doctor-patient online interaction via the Internet, to improve patient compliance. To evaluate patient compliance with this app, we conducted a comparative evaluation at the Chinese PLA General Hospital in Beijing from Sep 2020 to Oct 2020. Qualitative interviews were performed to explore the patients' reasons for high or low compliance. 50 enrolled subjects completed the one-month evaluation, during which 142 headache diaries were collected, and 223 headache episodes occurred. The evaluation results showed that patient compliance with MyHeadache (68.06%) was higher than that with the paper headache diary (34.12%). SPSS 16.0 was also used to test group differences in compliance rates. At the 5% significance level, Levene's test was conducted, where sig =
$0.85 > 0.05$
, which indicated that the variance was equal in the two groups. Then, with sig =
$0.004 < 0.05$
in the t-test, patient compliance was proven to be significantly different between the MyHeadache group (68.06%) and the paper diary group (34.12%). The qualitative interviews indicated that the reasons for higher compliance with MyHeadache were as follows: 1) finding the application easy to use, 2) receiving physician feedback via the Internet, and 3) receiving instant pain relief suggestions. The rates of persistence and compliance of the patients in using MyHeadache were higher than those of the patients using paper diaries. So in the future, this app is expected to be widely used in clinical practice.