UofM Receives $5.9 Million NIH Grant for a National Center in AI-based mHealth Research
mDOT: Transforming health and wellness via temporally precise mHealth interventions
July 16, 2020 - National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded a new national biomedical technology resource center (BTRC), called the mHealth Center for Discovery, Optimization & Translation of Temporally-Precise Interventions (mDOT). mDOT will be headquartered at the MD2K Center of Excellence at the University of Memphis.
The multidisciplinary mDOT team consists of leading researchers in artificial intelligence (AI), mobile computing, wearable sensors, privacy and precision medicine from the University of Memphis (lead), Harvard University, Georgia Institute of Technology, Ohio State University, the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF).
One of the biggest drivers of the nation鈥檚 rising health care spending is providing care for patients with chronic diseases, many of which are linked to daily behaviors and exposures such as dietary choices, sedentary behavior, stress and addiction. The mDOT Center will be a new national technology resource for improving people鈥檚 health and wellness. It will conduct cutting-edge AI research to produce easily deployable wearables, apps for wearables and smartphones and a companion cloud system. mDOT鈥檚 innovative technology will enable patients to initiate and sustain the healthy lifestyle choices necessary to prevent and/or successfully manage the growing burden of multiple chronic conditions.
鈥淩esearchers and industry innovators can leverage mDOT鈥檚 technological resources to create the next generation of mHealth technology that is highly personalized to each user, transforming people鈥檚 health and wellness,鈥� said Santosh Kumar, PhD, the lead investigator of mDOT, who is the director of MD2K Center of Excellence and Lillian & Morrie Moss Chair of Excellence Professor in Computer Science at the University of Memphis.
To ensure mDOT鈥檚 innovative technology can be used by scientists to solve real-world problems, mDOT will be working closely with more than a dozen other federally funded projects to engage in joint technology development, testing and large-scale real-life deployment. To fuel mHealth technology innovation in the industry, mDOT will establish a new industry consortium to provide access to mDOT鈥檚 latest research and seek feedback to inform its ongoing research.
The mDOT Center will be administered by the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB).
鈥淭he mDOT Center will be the first BTRC focused on developing innovative mHealth technologies,鈥� said mDOT鈥檚 program officer, Tiffani Lash, PhD, director of the NIBIB program in Connected Health. 鈥淚t is positioned to empower scientists to discover, personalize and deliver temporally precise mHealth interventions and treatments, ensuring that health and wellness tools are delivered at the right moment, via the right personal device and is optimized to have the most influence.鈥�
鈥淭his latest award not only appropriately recognizes the expertise and impact of Dr. Kumar and his team, the importance of their life-changing work, but also the remarkable progress of the University of Memphis as a national research university,鈥� said UofM President M. David Rudd.
For more information about the mDOT Center, please visit the mDOT website at .
About MD2K: The Center of Excellence for Mobile Sensor Data-to-Knowledge (MD2K), headquartered in the FedEx Institute of Technology at the University of Memphis, was established in 2014 by a grant from NIH under its Big-Data-To-Knowledge (BD2K) initiative. It has developed mobile sensor big data technologies to improve health and wellness. MD2K鈥檚 open-source software platforms for smartphones and the cloud are used across the nation to conduct scientific studies.