NIH grant to help UCSF accelerate mobile health research

The National Institutes of Health has awarded $9.75 million to University of California at San Francisco (UCSF) over the next five years for creation of Health ePeople, a platform that will enable investigators to conduct mobile and wireless health research.

The research platform will accelerate mobile health by providing researchers with easy access to a large cohort of volunteers who have agreed to participate in the research, along with a quick, affordable means for collecting their health data through mobile and wireless technologies, according to information on the institution's website.

Health ePeople builds off the success of UCSF's Health eHeart Study, an effort to gather the cardiovascular data of 1 million patients through devices such as smartphone apps, ECG smartphone cases and portable blood pressure cuffs. 

“The primary goal of Health ePeople is to provide a resource enabling convenient and efficient mobile and wireless health research,” said co-principal investigator Jeffrey Olgin, MD, professor of medicine and chief of cardiology at UCSF. “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.”

Health ePeople will use data from patients enrolled in the Health eHeart Study and recruited externally. It will have several external advisory groups in data standards, technical, research, participation, ethics/advisory and business.

The team plans to collaborate and coordinate with other major ongoing mHealth-related projects, including the federal Mobile Sensor Data-to-Knowledge (MD2K) Center of Excellence, the non-profit Open mHealth, the NIH Precision Medicine Initiative and the nongovernmental PCORnet and PCORI National Patient-Centered Clinical Research Network.

Since its launch in 2013, the Health eHeart Study has implemented a user-friendly interface to collect patient-reported outcomes, validate survey data and integrate with multiple sensors, devices and apps. It uses modular electronic consenting and options for external investigators to utilize and enroll their own participants.

The team behind the project also created a study management portal with real-time dashboard and flexible messaging system as well as a private, secure database and data management system.