A two-day conference that will explore the clinical evidence necessary to drive the widespread uptake of digital health solutions is being hosted by the Scripps Translational Science Institute in partnership with NatureResearch. DIGIMED17: Transforming Healthcare Through Evidence-Driven Digital Medicine is scheduled for October 5-7 at the STSI in La Jolla, California. 

"Currently, there is a shortage of clinical trial data investigating the role of digital medicine, although this evidence is critically necessary if it is to achieve its potential to transform care. There is a clear need for a forum to present, discuss and debate existing evidence and how to best obtain it in order to accelerate change," according to an overview on the conference website. "This one-of-its-kind, interactive conference will be led by a faculty composed of leaders in this burgeoning field, with a mix of developers, investigators and providers. The principal goal of the conference is to jumpstart efforts to drive the widespread incorporation of evidence-based digital medicine solutions for more-personalized, individual-centric care to improve outcomes, advance satisfaction and decrease costs."

Three members of the research team at the Center of Excellence for Mobile Sensor Data-to-Knowledge (MD2K) are editors of a new mHealth textbook released recently by Springer.

Mobile Health: Sensors Analytic Methods and Applications, provides a comprehensive look at the current state-of-the-art in mHealth technology that is accessible to technology-oriented researchers and practitioners who have backgrounds in computer science, engineering, statistics and applied mathematics.

“The authors of this book, led by the editors James Rehg, Susan Murphy, and Santosh Kumar, represent many of the most respected and accomplished leaders in this rapidly growing field. They together represent the diversity of disciplines that make up mHealth, Deborah Estrin, the Robert V. Tishman Founder’s Chair in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell Tech, said in her forward. “I expect this book to become an indispensable resource for community members as they address new research problems, prepare publications and grant applications, plan courses, and act as consultants to other practitioners or researchers.”

Many of us use mobile sensors to monitor our health and wellness. These sensors can now also be used to help us improve our work performance and productivity.

Toward that end, a University of Memphis-led, six-university team will develop and test a system of mobile sensors and software, called mPerf, that can be used to objectively assess everyday job performance. The mPerf project is sponsored by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA)’s Multimodal Objective Sensing to Assess Individuals with Context (MOSAIC) program.

A series of videos posted by the American Association for the Advancement of Science aims to help potential fellows prepare the best possible application. AAAS accepts applications for the AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellowships (STPF) through November 1. 

According to the AAAS website, the fellowships "provide opportunities to outstanding scientists and engineers to learn first-hand about policy making while contributing their knowledge and analytical skills to the federal policymaking process. Fellows serve yearlong assignments in the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the federal government in Washington."

The video series features fellows discussing why they applied, how to draft a stand-out application, tips for interviewing, what the fellowship is like and how it transformed their careers.

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.