Dr. Kumar has been leading mobile health (mHealth) projects since 2007 when his AutoSense project for sensor-based monitoring of stress and addictive behaviors in the field environment was selected in the Genes Environment & Health Initiative (GEI) common fund program of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). He also led an NIH Center of Excellence on Mobile Sensor Data-to-Knowledge (MD2K), funded through the big data-to-knowledge (BD2K) initiative (2014-2021) that developed innovative tools and open-source software to make it easier to collect, integrate, manage, visualize, analyze, and interpret health-related data generated by mobile and wearable sensors.  He is currently the Director of the NIH NIBIB mHealth Center for Discovery, Optimization, and Translation of Temporally-Precise Interventions (the mDOT Center) that provides the methods, tools, and infrastructure for researchers to discover, optimize, and deploy temporally-precise mHealth interventions to address growing public health problems.

mDOT’s software platforms are being used in fourteen studies across 12 states to investigate stress, smoking, overeating, heart failure, oral hygiene, work performance, and cocaine use. Hundreds of terabytes of sensor data have been collected by Dr. Kumar and his collaborators and used to discover novel mHealth biomarkers such as stress, conversation, smoking, craving, cocaine use, brushing, and flossing, and sensor-triggered interventions.

In addition to direct experience with leading transdisciplinary mobile sensor research projects, Dr. Kumar has led national efforts to advance the field of mHealth. In 2011, he chaired the national meeting on “mHealth Evidence” organized by NIH and NSF to establish evidence requirements for mobile health, and in 2014 he organized and chaired an NSF-NIH workshop on identifying computing grand challenges in mHealth. He mentors faculty members across the country in mHealth as part of the annual NIH mHealth Summer Institutes.