Background: The statistical significance of clinical trial outcomes is generally interpreted quantitatively according to the same threshold of 2.5% (in one-sided tests) to control the false-positive rate or type I error, regardless of the burden of disease or patient preferences. The clinical significance of trial outcomes-including patient preferences-are also considered, but through qualitative means that may be challenging to reconcile with the statistical evidence.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUse of robust, quantitative tools to measure patient perspectives within product development and regulatory review processes offers the opportunity for medical device researchers, regulators, and other stakeholders to evaluate what matters most to patients and support the development of products that can best meet patient needs. The medical device innovation consortium (MDIC) undertook a series of projects, including multiple case studies and expert consultations, to identify approaches for utilizing patient preference information (PPI) to inform clinical trial design in the US regulatory context. Based on these activities, this paper offers a cogent review of considerations and opportunities for researchers seeking to leverage PPI within their clinical trial development programs and highlights future directions to enhance this field.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Regulatory and clinical decisions involving health technologies require judgements about relative importance of their expected benefits and risks. We sought to quantify heart-failure patients' acceptance of therapeutic risks in exchange for improved effectiveness with implantable devices.
Methods: Individuals with heart failure recruited from a national web panel or academic medical center completed a web-based discrete-choice experiment survey in which they were randomized to one of 40 blocks of 8 experimentally controlled choice questions comprised of 2 device scenarios and a no-device scenario.
The development of technology to treat unmet clinical patient needs in the United States has been an important focus for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the 2016 Congressional 21st Century Cures Act.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCurrent myoelectric prosthetic limbs are limited in their ability to provide direct sensory feedback to users, which increases attentional demands and reliance on visual cues. Vibrotactile sensory substitution (VSS), which can be used to provide sensory feedback in a non-invasive manner has demonstrated some improvement in myoelectric hand control. In this work, we developed and tested two VSS configurations: one with a single burst-rate modulated actuator and another with a spatially distributed array of five coin tactors.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFVisual and somatosensory signals participate together in providing an estimate of the hand's spatial location. While the ability of subjects to identify the spatial location of their hand based on visual and proprioceptive signals has previously been characterized, relatively few studies have examined in detail the spatial structure of the proprioceptive map of the arm. Here, we reconstructed and analyzed the spatial structure of the estimation errors that resulted when subjects reported the location of their unseen hand across a 2D horizontal workspace.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIEEE Trans Neural Syst Rehabil Eng
October 2011
Somatosensation is divided into multiple discrete modalities that we think of separably: e.g., tactile, proprioceptive, and temperature sensation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF