UCSF Receives $9.75M NIH Grant

UC San Francisco has received a $9.75 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to create a platform that will allow researchers to conduct mobile health research in a more efficient manner.

The platform, known as Health ePeople, is an expansion of a so far successful UCSF study of cardiac health. Information on more than 30,000 people worldwide has been gathered through smartphone apps, smartphone cases that can perform electrocardiograms, and portable blood pressure cuffs. 

“Given the research backgrounds of the Health eHeart principal investigators and the fact that cardiovascular disease remains the most common killer in the United States and the world, our initial emphasis has been on cardiovascular disease,” said Gregory Marcus, M.D., director of clinical research in UCSF's cardiology department who will serve as a co-investigator of the Healthy ePeople initiative. “However, we and others interested in utilizing our infrastructure quickly realized the immediate applicability to other disciplines. Indeed, broader interests in diet, physical activity, geolocation and smartphone use patterns have piqued the interests of many different collaborators to utilize our platform.”

The Health ePeople initiative will have several external advisory groups in data standards, technical, research, participation, ethics/advisory and business.

“The primary goal of Health ePeople is to provide a resource enabling convenient and efficient mobile and wireless health research,” said Jeffrey Olgin, M.D., professor of medicine and chief of cardiology at UCSF. “It will help investigators collect mobile health data via integration with sensors, devices and apps, deliver online surveys, connect with external data sources including electronic health records, and use novel methods for ascertaining and adjudicating clinical outcome events.”

The grant will be distributed to UCSF over a three-year period.