The organizers of the 1st ACM MobiSys Workshop on Digital Biomarkers are looking for participants for a session on "Proposed Study Design. The session is not about experimental results. Rather, it will focus on user study design of the small to large-scale research projects/other practical explorations of various digital biomarkers. The organizers hope to bring together researchers from academia, industry and medical sciences to facilitate a lively and stimulating discussion about various digital biomarker related user study design challenges and solutions.

Those interested should submit a one-page writeup with a title and the presenter's name for the session. The write-ups will not be published as part of the ACM proceedings, but each submission will get a slot to be presented in the "Proposed Study Design" session of the workshop.

Dr. William T. Abraham, who leads the MD2K investigation on novel mobile sensor-based approaches to reducing readmission among congestive heart failure patients, is the 2017 Distinguished Scientist Award-Clinical Domain by the American College of Cardiology. The award recognizes Dr. Abraham’s contributions to the cardiovascular profession.

Dr. Abraham is director of the Division of Cardiovascular Medicine at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center. The award was announced during the convocation ceremony at ACC’s 66^th Annual Scientific Session & Expo held March 17-19 in Washington, D.C.

mHealth Connect 2017, scheduled for April 18-19 at Stanford University, will feature a public event on April 18, where participants can hear how organizations utilize consumer wearable devices to change how they operate, what challenges they face and their vision of the future. Attendees will be able to connect with device and app developers, clinicians and researchers. 

mHealth Connect, inaugurated in 2016, aims to improve the use of physical activity wearables and apps for clinical purposes. 

Attendance to the April 18 event is free, but you must register. The public event will be 1 p.m. - 6 p.m. in Paul Brest Hall in the Munger Conference Center at Stanford. 

Papers are now being accepted for the 1st Workshop on Digital Biomarkers, collocated with MobiSys 2017 in Niagara Falls, New York. The workshop offers a unified forum that brings academics, industry researchers and medical practitioners together and seeks novel, innovative and exciting submissions broadly related to the modeling, testing, and validation of new digital biomarkers for predicting incidence of diseases, health conditions, effects of treatments, and interventions. It also aims to start a systematic discussion among experts from different knowledge domains including mobile sensing, systems, machine learning, medicine and health sciences in order to:

Researchers are invited to submit papers for the Symposium on Big Data Analytics for IoT Healthcare, planned as part of the 5th IEEE Global Conference on Signal & Information Processing. The conference is planned for November 14-16, 2017 in Montreal.

From the announcement: "The rapid growth of Internet of Things (IoT) and Big Data, as well as the public embracement of miniature wearable biosensors have generated new opportunities for personalized eHealth and mHealth services. The advantages of these services include the availability and accessibility, ability to personalize and tailor content, and cost-effective delivery. Still, many challenges need to be addressed in order to develop consistent, suitable, safe, flexible and power-efficient systems fit for medical needs. To enable this transformation, it requires multidisciplinary research, as well as close collaboration between academia and industries.

The deadline is March 15 to apply for support to attend the 5th International Conference on Ambulatory Monitoring of Physical Activity and Movement (ICAMPAM).

The National Science Foundation’s Smart and Connected Health Program is supporting 10 graduate students from campuses across the United States to attend ICAMPAM.

The International Society for the Measurement of Physical Behavior is partnering with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) to organize the ICAMPAM 2017. The ICAMPAM 2017 will be held from June 21-23, 2017 at the NIH, Bethesda, MD, USA. The conference is planning to address multiple areas of ambulatory monitoring of physical activity and movement research. The ICAMPAM 2017 conference brings together leaders from the fields of ambulatory monitoring, wearable monitors, physical activity, sedentary, movement behavior, and advanced analytics.

The 3rd ACM Workshop on Wearable Systems and Applications (WearSys), held June 19 in conjunction with the ACM International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications and Services (MobiSys2017) has issued a call for submissions for papers or posters/demos.

WearSys is focused on wearable technologies that can shape mobile computing, systems and applications research. WearSys will provide a venue for presenting current research and technology trends, and debating future research agendas of wearable technology. It will provide a forum for discussing innovative and/or ideas that have potential for significant impact. WearSys is soliciting papers of six or fewer pages that present preliminary research in prototyping a wearable system, experience in designing a novel wearable technology, or survey of useful tools for designing inter-disciplinary wearable systems and applications. The worshop encourages position papers that propose new directions for research or advocate disruptive design ideas and project applications. Also encouraged are submissions that can help bootstrap exploration of the wearable design space by the broader mobile systems community. The deadline for submissions is March 21.

An article published February 8 in the Journal of Medical Internet Research discusses the Connected and Open Research Ethics (CORE) initiative, a tool for researchers and Institutional Review Boards to help them share resources.

CORE, housed at the University of California-San Diego, is working to develop dynamic and relevant ethical practices to guide mHealth and digital medicine research. The paper, co-authored by John Torous, M.D., of Harvard Medical School and Camille Nebeker, M.S., Ed.D. of the Department of Family Medicine and Public Health, Division of Behavioral Medicine at UCSD, encourages readers to join the CORE Network in order to contribute to the "bigger conversation" on ethics in the digital age. 

Dr. Nebeker gave a recent webinar on Research Ethics in the Digital Age as part of the MD2K Center's webinar series. 

A call for papers has been announced for the first Workshop on Digital Biomarkers, which will be co-located with MobiSys 2017. The workshop offers a unified forum designed to bring academics, industry researchers and medical practitioners together. The organizers seek novel, innovative and exciting submissions that are broadly related to the modeling, testing, and validation of new digital biomarkers for predicting incidence of diseases, health conditions, effects of treatments, and interventions.

The workshop aims to facilitate a systematic discussion among experts from different knowledge domains including mobile sensing, systems, machine learning, medicine and health sciences in order to:

• Identify new digital biomarkers capturing behavioral health, chronic and degenerative diseases
• Identify the key shortcomings of the existing mobile and wearable sensor systems, and research study software platforms (e.g., ResearchKit and ResearchStack) for digital biomarker inference in terms of scalability, customizability, and sensing affordances

The second Women in Data Science (WiDS) Conference is scheduled to be held Feb. 3 at Stanford University is sold out, but there are several regional events being held and thje conference will be live-streamed. 

According to its website, the conference "aims to inspire and educate data scientists, regardless of gender, and support women in the field. It is a one-day technical conference that will feature the latest research in a number of domains as well as provide information on how companies are using data science to their advantage. 

In addition to the Stanford conference, WiDS events are being held at 46 other locations. A list can be found here. It will also be broadcast live.  

The new year promises to be an exciting one for mHealth. We thought we'd share some of the articles that look forward to 2017 (and a few that look back at 2016):

• 2017: The Year Ahead in Healthcare Information Technology — Healthcare IT News
• Eight digital health predictions for 2017 — MobiHealthNews
• CES 2017: Has tech's sensor obsession gone too far? — BBC News
• Innovation: What’s to Come in 2017 —  Applied Clinical Trials
• Science Fiction Becomes Science Fact: 2016's Biggest Achievements in Medicine — U.S. News & World Report

Applications are now being accepted for the 2017 mHealth Training Institute (mHTI), which will be held August 6-11, 2017 at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The application deadline is January 29. A total of 35 scholars will be selected to attend the institute.

The goal of the NIH-funded mHTI is to develop the next generation of academic mHealth researchers. The unique transdisciplinary incubator brings together researchers from disparate backgrounds for a week-long, immersive “bootcamp” in all things related to mHealth. In addition to providing the participants with a core educational grounding in transdisciplinary perspectives and methodologies essential to mHealth innovation, the mHTI seeks to instill in participants the intrapersonal and interpersonal skills and connections necessary for cross-cutting research.

The day-long 2016 BD2K Open Data Science Symposium: How Open Data and Open Science are Transforming Biomedical Research, will be held Dec. 1 in Bethesda, MD and webcast by the National Institutes of Health. 

The symposium, which will run 8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. ET, will feature discussions with the leaders in big data, open science and biomedical research. It will also showcase the finalists of the Open Data Science Prize, an international competition that sought prototypes on how to best unlneash the power of open content and data to advance biomedical research and its application for health benefit.