The NIH-funded mDOT Center Receives $6.2M to Develop Foundational AI for Wearables
Five-year renewal positions UofM-led center to advance AI-powered wearable technologies for personalized health and disease management
The mDOT Center is a National Center for Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NCBIB) that funds national experts in their respective fields to create critical and unique technology. The NCBIB program ensures that NIH-funded biomedical researchers gain access to the newest and most advanced technologies to improve our health and well-being. The mDOT Center is funded to develop foundational AI for wearables so that the signals generated by our bodies and brains in our daily lives offer us similarly powerful capabilities that today’s generative AI offers for text and images.
The mDOT Center has well-established expertise in collecting, analyzing, and modeling massive amounts of physiological and behavioral data collected from the free-living environment. The team has collected hundreds of terabytes of real-life data from wearables over the past decade and is using them to train AI that can robustly track health-related behaviors in daily life. The mDOT Center’s latest AI technologies will enable scientists to develop, optimize, and disseminate a new generation of intelligent, personalized, interactive, and long-lasting digital health interventions that can improve the prevention and self-management of chronic diseases and mental health.
The mHealth Center for Discovery, Optimization, and Translation of Temporally-Precise Interventions (the mDOT Center) is headquartered at the University of Memphis and includes investigators from Harvard University, the University of California, Los Angeles, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and The Ohio State University. The impact of the mDOT Center extends well beyond its investigative team through a national network of investigators, research collaborators, trainees, and technology users. The Center supports independently funded research projects and provides technologies, datasets, training, and other resources to researchers working across a broad range of health challenges. It has already supported more than 30 federally funded projects in 18 states.
Through programs such as the annual mHealth Training Institute (mHTI), the mHealthHUB virtual collaboratory, and the curated collection of technologies and datasets in the Digital Toolbox, the mDOT Center also helps train and connect the broader mHealth research community. The five-year renewal continues the University of Memphis’s longstanding leadership in mobile and digital health research and provides a foundation for translating emerging technologies into tools that can ultimately improve how health and behavior are monitored, supported, and improved in everyday life.