2024 · Journal of developmental and behavioral pediatrics : JDBP · open access
The Living Lab at Home: Feasibility and Acceptability of Multimodal In-Home Data Collection Among Youth Across the Developmental Spectrum
Boerner et al.
The finding, in our words
In a 14-day study of youth with neurodevelopmental conditions and chronic pain, multimodal in-home monitoring achieved good accelerometer wear compliance (77% wore devices for at least 7 days) and moderate survey engagement, but adherence to salivary cortisol sampling was low at 28% after excluding protocol violations and dry swabs. Families reported high overall satisfaction and willingness to participate again, highlighting that remote sampling protocols in pediatric populations require iterative tailoring to improve biospecimen collection adherence.
A paraphrase to the Library’s standard, never the abstract. The source is one link away and is always the authority.
This study found that higher pre-sleep physiological stress, measured via self-collected saliva, was linked to increased cortical arousal during sleep and more consolidated rapid eye movement sleep in adolescents. The results support the use of decentralised sampling and in-home monitoring to investigate physiological interactions in natural sleep environments.
Acutely concussed youth studied at home showed longer sleep latency and greater fatigue than controls, with altered overnight cortisol dynamics and lower bedtime melatonin; these home-based saliva and actigraphy measures highlight decentralised endpoints for acute concussion care.
In youth aged 8–16 years, first-waking saliva cortisol, IL-6 and IL-1β collected at home associate with prior-night actigraphy sleep metrics. Sleep quality confounds interpretation of salivary stress and immune biomarkers in decentralised paediatric microsampling, so protocols must account for it.
This review establishes that microsampling across blood, saliva, urine and stool matrices offers validated workflows and regulatory recognition for human biomonitoring comparable to conventional methods. It finds that these decentralised approaches enhance participant acceptability and enable screening in remote or low-resource settings.
Salivary glucocorticoid concentrations were comparable across Salivette Cortisol, passive drool and SalivaBio collection methods, and remained stable for 72 hours at room temperature and 4 degrees Celsius with no significant degradation after repeated freeze-thaw cycles. In children under six years, the SaliPac pacifier swab was well tolerated and collected sufficient saliva for steroid analysis in under four minutes.