Wireless Clinical Trial of Data Capture Using a Personal Digital Assistant

Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) have the potential to improve clinical trial data collection; however, most current PDA-based clinical data collection systems typically collect and store data in the offline mode, and then transfer the data to an operational database. The purpose of this study was to explore the usefulness of a wireless clinical data collection system for an irritable bowel syndrome trial compared with the traditional paper based data collection. Methods: The paper has developed a PDA-based data capture system for clinical trials, and tested it in a double-blind trial.