By Scott Meier at UCSF.edu
Building on the success of the Health eHeart Study at UC San Francisco, the National Institutes of Health has awarded $9.75 million to UCSF over the next five years for creation of Health ePeople, a platform that will enable investigators to conduct mobile and wireless health research in a less costly, more streamlined manner.
The research platform will 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.
Health ePeople builds off the innovative Health eHeart Study, which harnesses the power of 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.
“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.”
The other co-principal investigators of the study are Gregory Marcus, MD, MAS, director of clinical research in the UCSF Division of Cardiology, and Mark Pletcher, MD, MPH, professor of epidemiology and biostatistics and director of the Informatics and Research Innovation Program at the UCSF Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute.