UCSF has scored a $9.75 million, five-year contract from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for the development of a platform for conducting digital health studies. Called Health ePeople, it will be used to access a large group of volunteers to collect their health data through mobile and wireless technologies.
“The primary goal of Health ePeople is to provide a resource enabling convenient and efficient mobile and wireless health research,” a co-principal investigator Jeffrey Olgin, who is also a professor of medicine and chief of cardiology at UCSF, said in a statement. “It will help investigators collect mobile health data via integration with sensors, devices and apps, deliver online surveys, connect with external data sources including electronic health records, and use novel methods for ascertaining and adjudicating clinical outcome events.”
Researchers working on the platform will also consult advisory groups about data standards, technology, research, participation, ethics, and business. Also, they will partner with other digital health-focused projects, such as the federal Mobile Sensor Data-to-Knowledge (MD2K) Center of Excellence, the private Open mHealth, and the NIH Precision Medicine Initiative.
UCSF said the platform won’t be ready to enroll new participants for several months, but people who want to participate in the cohort can sign up through the Health eHeart Study web page. Once the platform is ready, they will receive an email with instructions what to do next.
The Health ePeople platform won’t be ready to enroll new participants for several months.UCSF has reportedly received these funds in part because of the success of its existing digital health venture, the Health eHeart Study, which uses apps and connected consumer medical devices to track and monitor 1 million people in real-time. Since launching in 2013, the venture has enrolled more than 30,000 participants.
Although that [earlier] program was focused on cardiovascular disease, the technology could be applied to tracking other health factors such as diet, physical activity, geolocation, and smartphone use patterns; and in fact, the infrastructure developed for the program has been used by researchers from urology, obesity, pulmonary transplant, neurology, and oncology.
[Via: mobihealthnews]