Grant: Planning and Dissemination Grants - Institute/Initiative Community Support

Hypertension remains a leading preventable cause of cardiovascular disease in Canada, yet blood-pressure control remains lowest among racialized and disadvantaged groups. Home monitoring improves detection, but many discontinue use due to discomfort and inconvenience of traditional cuffs. Cuffless technologies such as Transdermal Optical Imaging offer a promising alternative using smartphone cameras; however, real-world accuracy is affected by lighting, device variability, calibration drift, and algorithmic bias across sex, gender, and skin tone. No national validation framework currently addresses these equity gaps. This 12 month Planning & Dissemination project, AIM-BP, will codesign and share a nationally scalable, equity-centred protocol for homebased cuffless BP monitoring. Two participatory workshops and a small feasibility pilot (10-15 participants, with potential expansion to 30-40) will define calibration cadence, fairness indicators, and usability standards across diverse users and device classes. Outputs will include the AIM-BP Home Validation Protocol and an Equity & Fairness Toolkit to support clinicians, researchers, and patients evaluating BP technologies under real-world conditions. Knowledge translation is embedded throughout. Patient and clinician partners will co-author outputs, receive honoraria, and support development of bilingual plain-language infographics, online summaries, and clinician one-pagers disseminated through open-access channels. The project incorporates SGBA+, prioritizing diversity in sex, gender, skin tone, and socio-economic context. Aligned with ICRH priorities in cardiovascular health, equity, and digital innovation, AIM-BP will deliver a fairness-integrated validation framework and strengthen national partnerships linking academia, clinical practice, home-care systems, and community stakeholders positioning the team for a subsequent CIHR Project Grant focused on validation and equitable implementation.