Litmus Health’s platform uses wearables and other sensors to improve quality of life

Litmus Health

Litmus Health is launching public beta of its platform to enable data collection at the point of experience from wearables, smart devices, and home sensors to inform clinical endpoints and guide trial management.

Initial focus of the platform is on Phase I/II clinical trials to help pharmaceuticals get breakthrough treatments to market faster. Too often researchers press forward having collected little data on what’s happening outside the clinic, and even then, only across a few dimensions.

“We need a better way to collect data in clinical research. Smartphones, wearables, and home sensors present a unique opportunity,” Dr. Samuel Volchenboum, Chief Science Officer of Litmus, and Director of the Center for Research Informatics at the University of Chicago, said in a statement. “Most researchers understand the value of patient-generated information collected at the point of experience, but they have no good way to harness those data. The ability to measure outcomes in multiple dimensions, remotely, is key. Litmus helps research teams and their sponsors make more confident go / no-go decisions.”

The Litmus platform supports more than 200 data sources that describe patients’ behavior and environments; it also draws from a library of validated patient surveys and can easily add new instruments. Researchers are able to customize their data sources and build their unique trial, combining traditional validated surveys with patient-generated remote data. The result is a comprehensive indication of a patient’s health and quality of life at any point in time.

Once data are collected, Litmus uses machine learning and other algorithms to align time-series data, integrate multiple orthogonal data sources, and look for correlations between behavior, environment, and patient outcomes.

The results are presented in the Litmus dashboard from where researchers can view each study’s progress and population trends, as well as individual participants’ data. The Litmus trial companion mobile app is available for iOS and Android, and it serves as a clearing house for device data, which it gathers and sends back to the platform.

“The challenge is to credibly accommodate the data they collect,” Daphne Kis, CEO of Litmus, said in a statement. “We have the opportunity to help researchers understand patients and their quality of life as we never have before, and the market is ready. These data are going to have huge implications for the healthcare ecosystem and for how we use patient data both in the clinical trials setting and beyond. In the not too distant future, the entire world will be one big clinical trial.”

Litmus’ platform is currently being piloted at the University of Chicago in a clinical trial run by gastroenterologist Dr. David Rubin on the effects activity, sleep, and diet on Irritable Bowel Disorder (IBD) patients.

Litmus was founded by an interdisciplinary team of healthcare, bioinformatics, and software engineering experts. The team is led by Daphne Kis, CEO, and Dr. Samuel Volchenboum, Chief Science Officer.