The goal of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) www.nsf.gov “Smart and Connected Health” (SCH) Program is to develop and use innovative approaches to support the transformation of healthcare.
The program recently issued the interagency Solicitation (NSF 16-601) to develop next generation healthcare solutions and encourage existing and new research to focus on breakthrough ideas in a variety of areas of value to health.
Basically, these breakthrough areas include sensor technology, networking, information and machine learning technology, decision support systems, modeling of behavioral and cognitive processes, as well as system and process modeling.
This interagency solicitation supports research activities that complement rather than duplicate the core programs of NSF and the NIH www.nih.gov and other agencies such as the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ www.ahrq.gov, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) www.nist.gov.
Specifically, the goal is to research and develop new tools and methods to:
- Enable interoperable, distributed, federated, and scalable digital infrastructure, languages, and tools to effectively share and use EHR data, plus develop networked applications to access data
- Investigate methods and algorithms for aggregation of multi-scale clinical, biomedical, contextual, and environmental data about each patient along with developing decision support tools
- Develop new approaches to empower patients and healthy individuals to participate in their own health and treatment
- Develop sensors, devices, and robotics to enable interoperable synchronized medical prosthetics and embedded devices
Applicants eligible to submit proposals may come from universities and colleges, non-profit, non- academic organizations, museums observatories, research labs, and professional societies.
Go to https://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2016/nsf16601/nsf/16601.htm to view the Solicitation posted in September. The deadline for submitting proposals is December 08, 2016. Eight to sixteen awards are anticipated per year but are subject to the availability of funds.
The anticipated funding amount for this solicitation is $11,000,000 to $20,000,000 to be invested in response to the solicitation. For more information, email Wendy Nilsen wnilsen@nsf.gov