NIH Awards to Develop Digital Health

NIH https://www.nih.gov has awarded seven contracts to companies and academic institutions to develop digital health solutions to help address the pandemic. The contracts are being awarded in two phases, and if the seven projects move into the second phase, the total value of the contracts in this network will be $22.8 million.

National Cancer Institute (NCI) https://www.cancer gov and the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB), https://www.nibib.nih.gov within NIH, selected projects from nearly 200 ideas which with further development could lead to user-friendly tools like smartphone apps, wearable devices, software to identify and trace contact of infected individuals, keep track of verified COVID-19 test results, and monitor the health status of infected and potentially infected individuals.

The projects represent a broad range of solutions for immediate public health needs related to the pandemic, and several focus on solutions for medically underserved communities and people with limited access to healthcare who are disproportionally affected by COVID-19.

The proposed digital health tools will leverage multiple data sources including wearable devices and COVID-19 diagnostic and  serology test results. Each organization will share data and other assets in an NIH-supported central data hub where researchers will have access to data stored in the hub.

The following companies received awards:

  • Evidation Health Inc. (San Mateo, CA)–a health measurement platform for analyzing a wide range of patient consented data
  • IBM (Armonk, NY) — an integrated solution supporting sophisticated contact tracing and verifiable health status reporting
  • iCrypto Inc.(Santa Clara, CA) — a smartphone-based platform to provide irrefutable proof of testing, serologic, and vaccination status for individuals
  • physIQ Inc. (Chicago) –an artificial intelligence-based data analytics and cloud computing platform plus FDA cleared wearable devices to create a personalized baseline index that could indicate change in health status for patients who have tested COVID-19 positive
  • Shee Atika Enterprises, LLC (Sitka, Alaska)– a smartphone-based platform to monitor and support individuals with COVID-19 symptoms who may need testing and those who have already tested positive
  • University of California (San Francisco)— a GPS-based retroactive contact tracing tool for alerting users about contact with SARS-CoV-1 infected individuals
  • Vibrent Health (Fairfax, Virginia) mobile applications, data integrations, and validated machine learning algorithms to identify COVID-19 and differentiate COVID-19 from flu and perform contact tracing using Wi-Fi technologies

 

In a separate but related effort, NIBIB awarded a contract to CareEvolution, LLC (Ann Arbor Michigan) for SAFER-COVID, a digital health solution that integrates self-reported symptoms data, from consumer wearable devices, EHRs, claims data., and COVID-19 test results, to indicate whether users are ready to return to work and assume normal activities during the COVID-19 pandemic.