Grant: Collaborative Research and Training Experience

The NSERC CREATE Biomedical Engineering Smartphone Training (BEST) program will provide professional training and practical employment-ready skills to students to meet the needs of the growing mHealth marketplace. mHealth is the practice of clinical medicine and public health supported by mobile devices, including the use of mobile devices in collecting community and clinical health data, delivery of healthcare information to practitioners, researchers, and patients, real-time monitoring of patients, and direct provision of care via mobile telemedicine. Specific objectives of the program are to:1. Provide students with the skills needed to conceive, design and build mHealth smartphone apps. This includes skills to design effective user-interfaces, collect data from sensors, analyze these data to create useful metrics, and visualize complex data for non-expert users and health practitioners. 2. Train the students to design and implement an evaluation protocol for apps. Specifically, validation protocol design, research on humans, and ethics.3. Entrepreneurship/intrapreneurship training so that students can identify a commercialization pathway to bring a mHealth app to the appropriate market.4. Develop skills to permit communication with various multi-disciplinary audiences necessary to identify patient and clinician needs, obtain ethics approvals, end-user support, financial backing, etc.5. Provide students with an awareness of the regulatory environment for mHealth applications.