Digital Health Technologies in neurology trials

Files for the manuscript "Evidence from ClinicalTrials.gov on the growth of Digital Health Technologies in neurology trials" (Masanneck, Gieseler, Gordon, Meuth, and Stern, 2023). Read the manuscript, which was published in Nature npj Digital Medicine on February 10th.

Accessing the research data

Created: December, 19, 2022 Author: Lars Masanneck and Ariel D. Stern

To use the data from this paper researchers have two options:

a) The first option is to simply download the final datasets for the individual indications (in .xlsx format) using the respective folders 1-4. Each folder contains an additional codebook in .xlsx format and the raw data in .dta (Strata) format. Please note that the raw data do not contain information which trials were used for the final analysis (unlike the .xlsx). Additionally, the raw data do not contain the manually mapped additional categorical features and location data.

b) The second option is to recreate the raw datasets using raw flat files. Each folder 1-4 contains an additional a Stata Do-file that combines raw data files to create the 'raw' .dta datasetfor the indication in each folder.

Note: for the published results in this study, raw files were downloaded from https://aact.ctti-clinicaltrials.org/pipe_files on March 05th, 2022.

In order to re-create the full datasets from raw files (for example, if a researcher wanted to update the dataset at a later point in time), they would need the following flat files, available at the url above:

• brief_summaries.txt
• conditions.txt
• countries.txt
• design_groups.txt
• design_outcomes.txt
• detailed_descriptions.txt
• interventions.txt
• intervention_other_names.txt
• sponsors.txt
• studies.txt

Analyses and figures

Analyses and figures for the manuscript can be found in the executable aggregated_analysis_Dec22.ipynb Jupyter notebook and the respective 'Graphs' and 'Outputs' folders. Code was run on Python 3.8.13, personal (currently free) API keys might be required for individual upload of maps to plotly chart-studio (see Jupyter notebook).

Original methodology

This article makes use of the methodology first presented in the manuscript "Quantifying the Use of Connected Digital Products in Clinical Research" (Marra, Chen, Coravos, and Stern, 2020). Its source code can be found in the respective repository.