# Development of a novel mobile health tool for age-specific dehydration assessment and management in patients with diarrheal disease

> **NIH NIH R01** · RHODE ISLAND HOSPITAL · 2020 · $618,136

## Abstract

Project Summary
Diarrheal diseases lead to an estimated 2.4 billion episodes of illness and 1.3 million deaths each year, with
the majority of those deaths occurring in adults, adolescents, and children over five years. As the severity of
diarrheal diseases can vary widely, accurately assessing dehydration status remains the most crucial
step in preventing morbidity and mortality. While patients with severe dehydration require hospital
admission and immediate resuscitation with intravenous fluids to prevent hemodynamic compromise, organ
ischemia, and death, those with mild to moderate dehydration can be treated in outpatient settings with
relatively inexpensive oral rehydration solution. Yet, while several tools have been validated for use in children
under five years of age, no clinical diagnostic tool has ever been validated for the assessment of
dehydration severity in adults, adolescents or children over five years of age with acute diarrhea.
Differences in both adult physiology and diarrhea etiology may compromise the accuracy of clinical diagnostic
models developed for use in young children. The proposed research will derive the very first age-specific
clinical diagnostic models created for the assessment of dehydration status in patients over five years of age
with acute diarrhea, incorporate those models into a new mobile health (mHealth) tool, and validate the
performance of this tool in a new population of patients with acute diarrhea.
To accomplish this task, we will enroll a prospective cohort of adults and children over five years of age with
acute diarrhea presenting to the rehydration unit of the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research,
Bangladesh (icddr,b) in Dhaka, Bangladesh and collect data on presenting clinical signs and symptoms shown
to correlate with dehydration severity in prior studies. We will then employ machine learning techniques to
derive age-specific clinical diagnostic models for assessing dehydration in patients over five years of age with
acute diarrhea. We will conduct formative research among clinicians working at icddr,b to develop an
innovative mobile phone based platform which will incorporate these new age-specific diagnostic models for
rapid use by frontline health workers. Finally, we will validate both the accuracy and reliability of the newly
developed mHealth tool in a new population of adults and children over five years of age with acute diarrhea.
Once developed and properly validated, this novel mHealth tool has the potential to help physicians,
nurses, and other healthcare providers more accurately diagnose dehydration severity and better
determine the optimal management strategy for patients with acute diarrhea. Improved diagnostic
approaches may in turn be shown to reduce both the morbidity and mortality that occurs as a result of missed
diagnoses of dehydration, as well as the adverse events and inappropriate utilization of limited healthcare
resources that can result from inaccura...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 9969419
- **Project number:** 5R01DK116163-03
- **Recipient organization:** RHODE ISLAND HOSPITAL
- **Principal Investigator:** Adam Carl Levine
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2020
- **Award amount:** $618,136
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2018-09-01 → 2023-06-30

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/9969419

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 9969419, Development of a novel mobile health tool for age-specific dehydration assessment and management in patients with diarrheal disease (5R01DK116163-03). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-23 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/9969419. Licensed CC0.

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