Mobile sensor big data has been used by hundreds of scientists across the country to discover new biomarkers and to get new insights into daily behaviors. Now, individuals — citizen scientists — will be able to engage in the same kind of discovery using their own data.
A personal edition of the software platforms, developed by the Center of Excellence for Mobile Sensor Data-to-Knowledge (MD2K), will allow anyone with an Android smartphone to collect, analyze and visualize their own mobile sensor big data while retaining their privacy since the data never leaves their own devices. Using the personal edition of mCerebrum (for Android smartphones) and Cerebral Cortex (for personal computers) gives them access to a wide variety of novel biomarkers (such as stress, mobility, workplace behaviors). These biomarkers have been discovered by analyzing hundreds of terabytes of mobile sensor data collected from thousands of participants in research studies all over the country.
“Use of the MD2K software will allow these citizen scientists to not only gain insights into their own daily behavior, but also to engage in the discovery of new biomarkers,” said Dr. Santosh Kumar, director of MD2K, who is the Lillian and Morrie Moss Chair of Excellence Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Memphis.
The personalized version of the MD2K platform, launched at the mHealth technology showcase held at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) campus in Bethesda (MD) is now available as a free download. Individuals who download this latest version of mCerebrum and Cerebral Cortex to their smartphone and personal computer will be able to collect data about themselves and run n-of-1 experiments on that data, said Dr. Timothy Hnat, Chief Software Architect for MD2K.
Information on the personal version of mCerebrum/Cerebral Cortex, plus a link to download it, can be found here: https://md2k.org/personal.
About MD2K
The MD2K Center of Excellence was established via a Big Data-to-Knowledge (BD2K) Center of Excellence grant from NIH. It is a collaboration among 20 investigators in Computer Science, Engineering, Medicine, Behavioral Science, and Statistics, drawn from 12 universities (Cornell Tech, Georgia Tech, Harvard, Northwestern, Ohio State, UCLA, UC-San Diego, UC-San Francisco, Utah, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the University of Memphis, the University of Michigan and West Virginia University). MD2K is developing innovative tools to make it easier to gather, analyze and interpret health data generated by mobile and wearable sensors. The goal of the big data solutions being developed by MD2K is to reliably quantify physical, biological, behavioral, social, and environmental factors that contribute to health and disease risk. The research conducted by MD2K is expected to improve the health of individuals through early detection of adverse health events and by facilitating prevention.