Transforming health and wellness via temporally-precise mHealth interventions
The mHealth Center for Discovery, Optimization & Translation of Temporally-Precise Interventions (the mDOT Center) provides the methods, tools, and infrastructure for researchers to discover, optimize and deploy temporally-precise mHealth interventions to address growing public health problems.
Organized around three Technology Research & Development (TR&D) projects, the mDOT Center represents a unique national resource that is developing multiple methodological and technological innovations. Each TR&D is creating technological resources for the biological community that include easily deployable wearables, apps for wearables and smartphones, and a companion mHealth cloud system, all of which are open-source.
One of the biggest drivers of the nation’s rising healthcare spending is providing care for patients with chronic diseases, many of which are linked to health behaviors such as poor diet, lack of exercise, and smoking. A key strategy for making self-care and preventive measures more achievable has been the integration of passive monitoring into everyday life via mobile sensors and providing personalized information and guidance to patients.
The tools developed by the mDOT Center transform the ability of researchers to leverage the full range of available sensors and mobile technologies, allowing them to deliver dynamically personalized and temporally-precise mHealth interventions to individuals. These interventions can precipitate a much-needed transformation by enabling patients to initiate and sustain the lifestyle choices necessary to prevent or successfully manage the burden of chronic health conditions.
The mDOT Center develops methods of identifying the ideal moments when health risks are elevated yet mitigatable. Our technologies have a significant potential to advance the fundamental understanding of health and behavior by supporting the analysis of complex, longitudinal, mHealth data.
To maximize the chances of success, mobile health intervention content is optimized to address the key drivers of current risk. The mDOT Center addresses these challenges by developing advanced reinforcement learning methods so that they can be applied to the case of mHealth interventions.
The mDOT Center resources make remote care possible for patients who have traditionally required close involvement of clinicians, marking a major transformation in care delivery. Our deliverables enable much greater personalization of mHealth interventions by expanding access to emerging biomarkers.
To ensure these innovations have a broad impact and solve real-world problems, the mDOT Center works with a number of collaborative projects to engage in joint-effort technology developments, each of which make a unique contribution, as well as selected service projects to provide opportunities to a wide variety of research teams who are well-equipped to become early adopters of mDOT Center technologies which meet their research needs.
The mHealth Center for Discovery, Optimization & Translation of Temporally-Precise Interventions is supported by the National Institutes of Health's National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering through its Biomedical Technology Resource Centers Program.
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