Using mobile technologies to more rapidly and accurately assess and modify behavior, biological states and contextual variables has great potential to transform medical research.  Recent advances in mobile technologies and the ubiquitous nature of these technologies in daily life (e.g., smart phones, sensors) have created opportunities for research applications that were not previously possible (e.g., simultaneously assessing biological, behavioral, physiological, and psychological states in the real world and intervening in real-time). Importantly, much of the work being done in mobile and wireless health (mHealth)  arises from siloed fields with a focus on the creation of products with little reference to previous research or to have any potential application in biomedical settings. Further, […]

The following is a guest blog post by Beth Mynatt, Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Vice Chair and professor of Interactive Computing and the executive director of Georgia Tech‘s Institute for People and Technology (IPaT).  I had the opportunity to attend President Obama’s White House announcement of his “Precision Medicine Initiative” last Friday. The president was introduced by Elana Simon, a computer science major at Harvard University, who has conducted cancer research and was diagnosed with a rare form of liver cancer as a teenager. Obama’s $215 million request, included in his fiscal 2016 budget, would go toward research by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the NIH’s National Cancer Institute and the […]