The University of California-San Francisco (UCSF) has been awarded $9.75 million over the next five years for the creation of a platform that will help investigators conduct mobile and wireless health research.
The platform, Health ePeople, will aim to accelerate mobile health (mHealth) 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, UCSF officials said.
The platform builds off UCSF’s Health eHeart Study, which uses online and mobile technology to gather cardiovascular data from study participants through devices such as smartphone apps, ECG smartphone cases and portable blood pressure cuffs. With a goal of one million participants, Health eHeart already has more than 30,000 people enrolled from around the world, with no study centers other than the one at UCSF, officials said.
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 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, M.D., 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.”
While the platform won’t be ready to enroll new participants for several months, UCSF officials said that individuals interested in becoming part of the million person cohort can sign-up now through the Health eHeart Study and will be given the option to transfer into the new platform as soon as enrollment begins. Any adult with a working email address can join the study.
