The Digital Drugs Society (DiMe) introduced it’s partnering with Alcohol and Drug Providers (ADS), Duke College, Google Fitbit, Morse Clinics, North Carolina Central College, Ōura, ProofPilot, Triangle CERSI and the College of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC).
The partnership goals to make use of knowledge collected from client wearables to decrease opioid use dysfunction (OUD) fatalities by creating interventions to assist forestall relapse.
In accordance with a 2023 Nationwide Survey on Drug Use and Well being by the Substance Abuse and Psychological Well being Providers Administration (SAMHSA), amongst individuals aged 12 or older in 2023, 2.0 % (or 5.7 million individuals) had an opioid use dysfunction prior to now 12 months.
The companions will collaborate to explain and collect physiological alerts and conduct traits, together with coronary heart price, insomnia, bodily inactivity and physiological stress, that may forecast relapse and be measured by wearable applied sciences.
Researchers will use smartphones to gather psychological well being traits reminiscent of social isolation, patient-reported nervousness and melancholy. The info factors prepare a software to forestall opioid relapse.
The staff will proceed with analysis collectively led by Duke College’s BIG IDEAs Lab and enlist sufferers for a pilot research to check the strategy and be sure that their strategies receive optimal-quality knowledge to develop the relapse prevention software.
“OUD is a fancy problem, and sophisticated challenges require modern collaboration and options,” Candice Taguibo, affiliate program director of DiMe, mentioned in an announcement.
“Our staff is working to include the numerous points at play for these going through OUD – psychological well being, social assist, therapy choices, funds, entry to expertise, social stigma, and extra – and construct a software that may meaningfully change the arc of OUD relapse and save 1000’s of lives.”
Shyamal Patel, senior vice chairman of science at Oura, asserted that leveraging technological developments to develop evidence-based protocols for individuals dwelling with OUD will place these interventions for fulfillment.
“We’re proud to assist this research by offering steady well being monitoring and customized, data-driven insights. This could empower people to take proactive steps of their restoration, doubtlessly lowering the burden on our overstretched public well being methods and providing a vital software within the struggle towards the opioid epidemic,” Patel mentioned in an announcement.
THE LARGER TREND
In March, DiMe and Google Well being launched a free on-line course for medical professionals, researchers, directors and innovators to study the basics of generative AI, massive language fashions (LLMs) and the applied sciences’ use circumstances in healthcare.
The Generative AI for Healthcare course gives stakeholders with an understanding of LLMs and their functions in healthcare. As well as, contributors will achieve insights into generative AI expertise, develop immediate engineering expertise and discover how AI can assist decision-making in medical settings.
In 2024, researchers from South Korea constructed machine learning-based fashions that may predict temper episodes utilizing solely sleep and circadian rhythm knowledge from wearable units.
The staff comprised researchers from the Institute for Primary Sciences (IBS), Korea Superior Institute of Science and Know-how (KAIST) and Korea College Faculty of Drugs.
In a research revealed in Nature’s Digital Drugs journal, the analysis staff first collected and analyzed 429 days’ value of sleep-wake knowledge generated from Fitbit of 168 Korean sufferers with temper problems, together with main melancholy and bipolar problems.
The analysis staff extracted 36 sleep and circadian rhythm options from this dataset, which have been then utilized to coach fashions primarily based on the machine studying library XGBoost to foretell temper episodes.
The findings revealed that the predictive fashions achieved 80%, 98% and 95% accuracy in predicting depressive, manic and hypomanic episodes, respectively.
That very same 12 months, Oura closed a $200 million Collection D funding spherical led by Constancy Administration & Analysis Firm and Dexcom. The funding raised the corporate’s valuation to $5.2 billion.
In November 2024, Dexcom made a $75 million strategic funding in Oura and established a strategic partnership that enabled two-way knowledge movement between Dexcom’s steady glucose monitor (CGM) and the Oura Ring. The funding on the time introduced Oura’s valuation to greater than $5 billion.
