The National Institutes of Health awarded a U team a $5.5 million grant to design a system that will be used to study pediatric asthma.
The team will develop the infrastructure over the next year based on input from medical faculty and patient families. The system will gather environmental data and individual patient information. Once tested, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) will implement the system across the country to help researchers and medical experts treat asthma in children more accurately.
Julio Facelli, professor of biomedical informatics, compares the project to Google Maps. They want to take ”information from all kinds of sources and integrate it so people can make decisions.”
Facelli and Kathy Sward, professor of biomedical informatics at the College of Nursing, will oversee the grant. Team members are from various backgrounds, including medicine, computer science, electrical engineering and chemistry. They applied to the NIH in May and felt their diverse team, previous qualifications and preliminary research helped win the grant.
The system intends to support massive amounts of data. Various tools will be used to collect information based on the NIH’s Pediatric Research through an Integrated Sensor Monitoring Systems program.
“Using sensors together to gather information in real time and high frequency, we can get a nice, rich picture of how these things interact with each other and affect kids with asthma,” Sward said.
Sward said Utah is a prime location with a “wonderful convergence” of environmental factors, data and medical resources, as well as a community that is interested and supportive of the research. Utah’s blend of air quality days will offer unique insight into asthma triggers.
“Several of us have personal connections,” Sward said. “We either have kids with asthma or know kids with asthma or we treat kids with asthma, so we’re all really excited about being able to move that research forward.”
The team’s first step is to determine what type of information they
want to collect. Working with doctors and researchers to gather information, they hope to get tools in the hands of parents and children as soon as possible, so direct feedback can be used to improve the system. They emphasize that they will not be doing any research themselves — rather they are building the infrastructure that will allow others to do clinical research.
The NIH anticipates the system will support actual studies within a year. While the grant was specifically for a framework, over time it will likely be expanded to support research for other diseases.
“It’s like building a very large telescope. Anybody can use it,” Facelli said.
The team hopes to see practical impacts of their work within a few years.
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