Mobile and Electronic Health ARC Receives Funding

After more than a year of planning and development, the Mobile and Electronic Health Affinity Research Collaborative (ME-Health ARC) successfully received funding to become a transdisciplinary center, in which the Institute will provide $10,000/year in software development support through the Software & Application Innovation Lab (SAIL). In addition to SAIL support, Hariri Institute research staff and fellows have been heavily involved in the ARC’s development, and will continue to serve on the steering and advisory committees.

The Mobile and Electronic (ME)-Health ARC aims to improve the health of underserved populations through mobile and electronic health research and training. The group will gather pilot data, host symposia, and develop eHealth research resources. The ME-Health ARC is housed at BU’s Medical Campus, in the Evans Center for Interdisciplinary Biomedical Research. The Evans Center works to support the formation of Affinity Research Collaborations, which consist of 5-8 investigators, including an ARC director, who focus on a research theme that is explored with the aid of different disciplines and technologies to advance research and discovery as it applies to disease states. Additionally, ARCs aim to enhance the education mission of graduate and post-graduate programs, as well as envision and develop institutional research cores.

Over the past year, collaborators created a pre-ARC group and hosted monthly meetings and an mHealth symposium to define the scope of research and potential projects. The ME-Health ARC consists of researchers and experts from a variety of disciplines who approach challenges with diverse technologies and methodologies in an effort to unlock new solutions to mobile and electronic health challenges. It also provides the opportunity for faculty at BU to become Evans Center affiliates and benefit from ongoing academic events and access to the data and resources generated by others ARCs.

BU’s Software Application & Innovation Lab (SAIL), which is housed at the Hariri Institute for Computing, has been crucial to the ME-Health ARC’s planning efforts, and will lead necessary software development for the ARC to realize its mission. SAIL is a professional software design and development lab that serves as a collaborative resource for computational and data-driven research efforts across Boston University. Recognizing that both the quality and impact of research are dependent on the development of high-grade software artifacts, the Institute launched SAIL in 2014 to provide researchers with professional software development capacity in support of projects that require cutting-edge solutions. Supported projects focus on a wide range of topics and technologies, from using natural language processing to analyze large literature corpora, to solving record linkage problems for public health and economics applications, to building mobile applications for medical studies, to building smart-city services and platforms.

Andrei Lapets, Director of Research Development for the Hariri Institute and Director of SAIL, and Frederick Jansen, Senior Software Engineer for SAIL both serve as ME-Health ARC steering committee members and will work with the SAIL team, including to develop and deploy software solutions for the ARC. Jacqueline You, a MED student who is also a SAIL intern and ARC trainee, will support software development work for the transdisciplinary center. Additionally, Azer Bestavros, Hariri Institute Founding Director, is on the ARC’s advisory committee, and Yannis Paschalidis, Hariri Institute Steering Committee member, serves on the ARC’s steering committee.