University of Memphis Launches NIH-Funded mHealth Research Center

The University of Memphis is launching a new research center that aims to combine mHealth and telehealth platforms with AI and precision medicine.

Funded by a $5.9 million grant from the National Institutes of Health, the mHealth Center of Discovery, Optimization & Translation of Temporally-Precise Interventions (mDOT) will bring together researchers from UM, Harvard, the Georgia Institute of Technology, Ohio State University, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, UCLA and the University of California at San Francisco.

“The mDOT Center will be the first BTRC (biomedical technology research center) focused on developing innovative mHealth technologies,” Tiffani Lash, PhD, director of the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering’s (NIBIB) program in Connected Health and mDOT’s program officer, said in a press release. “It is positioned to empower scientists to discover, personalize and deliver temporally precise mHealth interventions and treatments, ensuring that health and wellness tools are delivered at the right moment, via the right personal device and is optimized to have the most influence.”

Officials said the center will target innovative mHealth and telehealth programs for chronic disease management, including wearables, mHealth apps and cloud-based connected health platforms for sharing that data.

The center, which will be overseen by the NIBIB, will also work with more than a dozen other federally funded programs and will establish an industry consortium to post and share research.

Each member of the group will be working on a specific collaborative project focusing on addictive behavior, sedentary behavior, cardiovascular diseases, oral health and mental health, as well as taking part in six service projects aimed at testing and deploying new connected health technologies.

“Researchers and industry innovators can leverage mDOT’s technological resources to create the next generation of mHealth technology that is highly personalized to each user, transforming people’s health and wellness,” Santosh Kumar, PhD, mDOT’s lead investigator and the director of MD2K Center of Excellence and Lillian & Morrie Moss Chair of Excellence Professor in Computer Science at the University of Memphis, said in the release.