Mobile health technology (mHealth) brings great opportunity to improve quality of life, promote individual and public health, and reduce healthcare costs. Although mHealth devices and applications are proliferating, many challenges remain to understand how to provide the necessary usability, manageability, interoperability, availability, security, and privacy of these applications. Sarah Lord, Ph.D., Director of the Dissemination and Implementation Science Core of CTBH is part of a team of investigators at Dartmouth and Clemson University working on a recently funded National Science Foundation project to develop and evaluate feasibility of wearable computational jewelry for health-monitoring and management. The project, called Amulet, is being led by CTBH affiliate David Kotz, Ph.D., Professor of Computer Science at Dartmouth.
The interdisciplinary team, comprised of experts in engineering, computer science, human factors design and behavioral health care, is developing a fashionable, wearable body area network (WBAN) that will serve as a health management hub that collects data from a variety of health sensors, such as a glucose monitor, skin conductance device, or heart rate monitor. Amulet is designed to be a central repository for multiple sensor input for reporting and data analysis. The device could ultimately house mobile health applications and launch personalized interventions based on data signatures indicative of health problems, such as high blood glucose, tobacco use, or stress. The device will coordinate the activity of the body-area network and provide a discrete means for communicating with the wearer.
The research will examine the feasibility of the Amulet computational jewelry in terms of its accessibility and usability for potential end-users and its reliability for collecting and synthesizing data. Another key focus of the research will be to assess advantages of the wearable data repository for protection of security and privacy of information. The hope is that computational jewelry, such as the Amulet, can promote potential uptake of mobile Health applications for improving health care delivery. For more information about the Amulet project visit: http://amulet-project.org/