CSSI MIT/LL Digital Health Solutions (DHS) for COVID-19

National Cancer Institute, Frederick MD

Investigators

Abstract

In May 2020, in response to the rapidly expanding pandemic caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) launched a program called Digital Health Solutions for COVID-19. The goal of this initiative was to support the development of digital health tools that could leverage multiple data sources, privacy-preserving technologies, and computational tools to assist in managing population health during the COVID-19 pandemic. NCI and NIBIB awarded eight contracts to companies and academic institutions to develop such tools. These projects acquired large amounts of data from a broad set of sources including but not limited to wearable sensors, smartphones, electronic medical records, insurance claims data, and survey instruments. A key aspect of this initiative was to make the data available and accessible to researchers to enable current and future research. MIT Lincoln Laboratory (MIT-LL) was awarded the current contract to establish a data hub for the collected data. Analysis of the data by the broader research community will provide an opportunity to develop and refine predictive models, generating new learnings from the datasets to address the COVID-19 pandemic and future pandemics.