Using wearable-device data and AI to personalize health predictions for diverse women
Official title: SCH: Individualized learning and prediction for heterogeneous multimodal data from wearable devices
Funded at University of California Santa Barbara · NIH-11126704 · Data updated 2026-11-12
This project builds AI tools that use wearable-device data to create more personalized health predictions for women from different backgrounds.
Quick facts
| Grant type | R01 grant |
|---|---|
| Study type | NIH-funded research |
| Funding institution | University of California Santa Barbara NIH-funded |
| Lab location | 1 site (Santa Barbara, United States) |
| Project start | July 1, 2024 |
| Project end | June 30, 2028 |
| Funding year | 2025 |
| Award (this year) | $300,000 |
| NIH project number | 7R01CA297869-02 |
| Project ID | NIH-11126704 on NIH RePORTER |
Who could benefit from this research
✓Could help
Ideal candidates are women from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds who use or could use wearable devices or mobile health apps and who are concerned about conditions monitored by those devices.
✕Less likely to help
People without wearable-device data, men, or those whose health issues are not captured by the signals studied may not directly benefit.
What this research studies
The team develops new machine-learning methods to handle messy, irregular, and multi-resolution data collected from wearable devices and mobile health tools. They focus on two ethnically diverse women's health datasets and incorporate social determinants of health to better capture real-world differences. Work includes algorithm design, testing on historical wearable records, and methods to make predictions fairer across populations. The goal is to produce tools that could be adapted for remote monitoring and tailored health insights.
Why it matters
Potential benefit: If successful, this could improve personalized monitoring and reduce health disparities by giving women more accurate, tailored health information from wearables.
How similar studies have gone: Previous work using AI on wearable data has shown promising signals for health monitoring but has had limited real-world clinical adoption, so this project extends and adapts those approaches for more diverse populations.
Where this research is happening
-
University of California Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, United States Active
Researchers
- Principal investigator: Qu, Annie — University of California Santa Barbara
- Study coordinator: Qu, Annie
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About this research
- This is an active NIH-funded research project — typically early-stage science, not a clinical trial accepting patient enrollment.
- Some NIH-funded labs run parallel clinical studies or seek volunteers for related work. To check, contact the principal investigator or institution listed above.
- For full project details, budget, and progress reports, visit the official NIH RePORTER page.