mDOT Center Celebrates Year 5 Milestones and Looks Ahead to Next Phase

The mDOT Center has reached a landmark fifth year, marking a period of major scientific advances, new collaborations, and global impact in mobile health (mHealth). Building on its mission to transform health and self-care through AI, wearable technologies, and adaptive interventions, the Center has delivered breakthroughs that are reshaping how health is measured, predicted, and supported in everyday life.

Major Scientific Breakthroughs

This year, TR&D1 researchers developed the first large-scale Motion Foundation Model (MFM) for wearable accelerometry data, trained on more than 50 million hours of biosignal recordings. The model was featured in Apple’s global keynote for the AirPods Pro 3, where it now powers on-device calorie tracking and activity recognition for hundreds of millions of users worldwide — a clear demonstration of the Center’s translational impact.

Other teams advanced the science of real-time stress detection, next-generation multimodal sensing, and robust adaptive interventions, making mDOT’s methods more scalable and usable across diverse health challenges.

Expanding Collaborations

Year 5 also saw rapid growth in partnerships. The Center added eight new Collaborative Projects (CPs) and eight new Supported Projects (SPs), extending its network to 34 total research collaborations. These new partnerships span critical health domains including ADHD, cardiac arrest resuscitation, memory and cognition, physical activity disparities, obesity, heart failure, tobacco cessation, suicide prevention, and cancer screening — demonstrating the broad applicability of mDOT’s tools.

Training and Dissemination

The mHealth Training Institute (mHTI) has now trained 320 scholars across ten institutes, representing 32 states and 64 institutions, creating a nationwide network of future mHealth leaders. The Center’s mHealthHUB dissemination platform has reached nearly 59,000 visitors from 175 countries, with 221,000 page views. Collectively, the Center has published 230 peer-reviewed papers, delivered more than 230 talks and presentations, and archived 56 webinars and 143 lectures, totaling almost 170 hours of educational content.

Transition to the Next Phase

As it enters a no-cost extension and prepares for the next phase of its journey, the mDOT Center will focus on:

• • Supporting its expanded network of CPs and SPs to maximize scientific return.
  • Scaling digital tools and AI models developed over the past five years into practical, reusable resources for the mHealth community.
  • Expanding dissemination through mHealthHUB and open-source platforms.
  • Strengthening community engagement to ensure equity-focused innovation in real-world health care settings.

The Center’s trajectory points toward a future where advanced mobile health technologies will be routinely used to improve prevention, care, and self-management — moving beyond proof-of-concept into sustainable, real-world impact.