Special seminar series on patient-generated health data

Join us for three scientific seminars exploring health care innovations that leverage health-related data patients capture in their everyday lives.

Living in the digital age is doing more than just putting vast amounts of information at our fingertips. It’s also providing many opportunities to improve health and health care. Through interactions with everyday technologies, people generate rich digital footprints about their characteristics and experiences. This information—generated by and about patients who use smartphones, wearables, and social media—gives us a new way to understand illness and personalize health care.

Join us this summer for three scientific seminars on research innovations that leverage patient-generated health data right in our own backyard. Each seminar will be held from 4 to 5 p.m. at Group Health Research Institute (room 1509A). All are welcome.

June 9: “Surgical Site Infection: Seek and You Will Find with mHealth”

Heather Evans, MD, MS, FACS, associate professor of surgery at the University of Washington (UW), will examine how mobile health (mHealth) technology could provide the key to improving detection and management of surgical site infections (SSI). SSIs occur in 3–5 percent of all surgical patients, and up to 33 percent of patients who have abdominal surgery. More than half of patients who develop post-discharge SSI are readmitted to the hospital, making SSI the most common and costly health care-associated infection.

Dr. Evans has been studying SSIs since 1999 and is leading a multidisciplinary team investigating the role of mHealth interventions for early detection and treatment of SSIs. With investigators from UW Biomedical and Health Informatics and GHRI Assistant Investigator Andrea Hartzler, PhD, Dr. Evans created mPOWEr, the mobile Post-Operative Wound Evaluator. mPOWEr includes a smartphone app for patients and a web-based dashboard for providers to facilitate post-discharge data sharing of surgical wound symptoms and wound photography. Although it began as a way to capture wound surveillance data from patients, mPOWEr has rapidly evolved into a patient-centered tool to improve the post-discharge care experience for surgical patients.

June 23: “Aurora: A Wearable Device for Ambulatory Observation of Hemodynamic State”

Dan Morris, PhD, senior researcher in the Medical Devices Group at Microsoft Research, will present opportunities for detecting cardiovascular risk using a wearable device for outpatient monitoring of hemodynamic data, such as blood pressure and blood flow.

With his group at Microsoft Research, Dr. Morris is developing Aurora—a novel, wrist-worn sensor for cardiovascular health. This small, wireless device can be worn continuously in outpatient settings, enabling research about how cardiovascular metrics change over longer time periods than have typically been studied. Researchers can also study how these metrics correlate to daily activities, including sleep, exercise, eating, and taking medications.

Dr. Morris’ work at Microsoft has included signal processing and machine learning for input systems, making medical information more useful to hospital patients, and generating musical accompaniment for vocal melodies. His two main research worlds—"sensing stuff for input" and "making medical information useful"—are coming together with his work to develop sensing and machine learning for health and wellness. During his talk, Dr. Morris will demonstrate the Aurora device and ask the audience for ideas on important research questions related to Aurora.

July 14: “Getting More Value from Personal Informatics Data, Alone and Together”

Sean Munson, PhD, assistant professor of Human Centered Design & Engineering at the UW, will discuss early efforts and challenges in helping people gain value from tracking their personal health data with mobile devices and applications, both individually and in collaboration with others.

Connected devices and mobile apps let more and more people track information, including health and wellness data. More than 69 percent of U.S. adults now track data related to their health, with 14 percent using technology to so do. These percentages will continue to rise as new sensing technologies remove barriers to routine personal monitoring. But how much value do people gain from these tracking abilities? More data can increase a person’s capacity to understand their behavior and symptoms, factors that influence them, and opportunities for improvement. Producing actionable information, however, can be challenging for these individuals, the support networks with which they share it, and experts they consult.

Dr. Munson is a member of the UW’s dub group, a cross-campus initiative for research and education in human-computer interaction and design. He studies the use of software to support behavior change, focusing primarily on increasing people’s exposure to diverse political news and opinions and helping them achieve their health and wellness goals.

Learn more about these and other GHRI seminars on our Events page.