Researcher Story:

Will Dixon, Professor of Digital Epidemiology at the University of Manchester

In 2016, Will ran a national smartphone study to investigate the age old belief that weather can influence pain.

In this video, Will describes how they managed to recruit over 13,000 participants for the study, who then tracked their symptoms through their smartphones, with the uMotif app using patients’ phones GPS to link to local weather data to determine the impact of the elements on pain levels.

In this video, Will discussed the results of the study and what types of weather had the strongest correlation with worsening symptoms, with the hope that this will lead to new types of treatment in the future.