SBIR Phase I: The integration of smart wearables in the telehealth management workflow

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The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is to design a care-centered digital health platform for remote symptom monitoring of Parkinson’s Disease patients. Parkinson’s is a progressive neurological disorder affecting various movement and mobility, sleep quality, emotional and behavioral health, and other factors, with symptoms manifesting individually. Approximately 10 million people around the world currently live with Parkinson’s Disease. The total economic burden of Parkinson’s is roughly $51.9 Billion in the U.S. alone. Patient-provider communication is a significant challenge. This project proposes a digital health platform offering a patient-friendly mechanism for reporting symptoms and experiences in daily-life settings to the care team. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will design and pilot an interoperable digital health framework with an overarching objective to address the challenges of remote symptom monitoring. Neurologists have insufficient confidence in the patient-generated self-reports (paper-based logs) as they can be prone to biases and over-/under-reporting. This research will explore integrating commonly used smart wearables (such as smartwatches and smart finger rings) into a digital health platform to offer symptom monitoring services. A key technical challenge is to make the integration of wearables interoperable within the standards of electronic health records (EHR). Another focus is to identify appropriate data reporting and presentation for clinical oversight and decision-making. The project will pilot the digital health platform on patients with Parkinson’s and clinicians to measure feasibility and performance and to evaluate its potential to scale.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.