The Technical Core will provide general infrastructure and tools to address technical challenges in adopting mobile approaches to research including: participant recruitment, retention, and support; technological validation of new assessments; and securing data appropriately. We will provide the NIH an open and extensible technology platform for conducting mobile health research that has already been successfully deployed in over 20 different mobile health research studies by Sage Bionetworks and its partners. This platform includes Bridge Server, an open-source set of cloud-based web services and tools that support the secure deployment of mobile approaches and Synapse, a system for managing the dissemination of biomedical research data to researchers worldwide. In our first year, we will adapt a set of commonly used cognitive assessments for mobile implementations, and integrate these modules. Technology experts and scientists will work closely together to develop and validate the measures. This will serve as a model for provision of more general support for novel measure development by external developers in later years of the program, further expanding MobileToolbox. We will achieve our overall goal to support the development and dissemination of a broad set of mobile measures of human cognition via these Aims:
Aim 1 : We will extend and support the Center?s technology platform to serve the needs of the other center cores, external technology developers, and researchers. We will support the development of novel mobile measures of cognition through open Application Program Interfaces (APIs), Software Development Kits (SDKs), and standards that allow any researcher to publish new assessments of cognition through our platform. We will develop tools for researchers to easily create, configure, and deploy mobile measures of cognition into their own research studies, all without requiring writing new software code for each study. We will support the collection and dissemination of mobile health data and study results in a way that prioritizes the broad and rapid adoption of mobile cognitive assessments by the research community.
Aim 2 : We will select and develop a representative set of mobile measures covering a wide range of cognitive domains. Specific measures will be selected through interactions with the other cores, and validated though the data and statistical analysis core. We will support the Dissemination Core by releasing normative data, technical documentation, and best practices, and by offering customized consulting services to ensure the assessments achieve widespread adoption and impact.
