SRI receives NIH HEAL funding to tackle the opioid crisis

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To reverse the opioid crisis that continues to grip the nation, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded $945 million in total fiscal year 2019 funding for grants, contracts and cooperative agreements across 41 states through the Helping to End Addiction Long-term Initiative or NIH HEAL Initiative. The trans-NIH research effort aims to improve treatments for chronic pain, curb the rates of opioid use disorder (OUD) and overdose, and achieve long-term recovery from opioid addiction.

The Spine Research Institute has received a UH2 (Technology Research Site) award to develop a technology platform that utilizes a variety of digital data sources including wearable sensors to provide actionable outcome metrics for patients suffering from back pain. It is also collaborating with UCSF, Stanford, and Berkeley as part of a U19 (Mechanistic Research Center) award.

See OSU College of Engineering's press release

The abstract for SRI's UH2 project can be read below.

Current diagnostics and treatments of chronic low back pain (cLBP) rely primarily on subjective metrics and do not target all the multidimensional biopsychosocial mechanisms. This multidisciplinary effort will develop and validate a digital health platform and provide meaningful data-driven metrics that enable an integrated approach to clinical evaluation and treatment of cLBP. This platform will facilitate the use of quantitative spinal motion metrics (function), patient-reported outcomes, and patient preference information to enable deep patient phenotyping and inform clinical decision making on personalized treatments in order to improve outcomes. This effort will involve software and hardware development to enable data collection, analysis, and visualization in clinical settings. The outcome of this project will be a digital health platform with data to support regulatory submission for clinical use. At the end of this effort, the researchers will have a validated tool for integration in clinical research studies supported by the BACPAC Consortium.