IUCRC Phase I USC: Center to Stream Healthcare In Place (C2SHIP)

Chronic health conditions are financially and emotionally costly. Immediate, creative action is needed to provide solutions for managing physical, social and psychological needs that maintain autonomy and quality of life. Research on long-term functioning of those with chronic illnesses is lacking.

The Center to Stream Healthcare In Place (C2SHIP) unites the best minds in academic medicine with leaders in biomedical industry to research, develop and promote in-place care technologies for managing chronic diseases in the home. The University of Arizona serves as the C2SHIP Lead Site with Partner Sites being University of Southern California, Baylor College of Medicine, and California Institute of Technology.

The Center will accelerate innovation through partnerships, multi-specialty collaborations, and resource sharing. C2SHIP will prepare an educated workforce to promote wellness through self-care technologies.

The Center’s trans-disciplinary team will pursue research and development in new material-based sensors, reconfigurable designs, and system integration with data mining, machine learning, and Artificial Intelligence. Through “Internet of Things”, patient data can be streamed to medical professionals at remote locations in real-time, establishing a mobile hub for vulnerable patients in their own home.

C2SHIP will focus on mitigating physiological, environmental, and psychological changes for real-time management and intervention. University of Southern California (USC) will focus on the clinical medicine aspect of the Center, proving cutting-edge technologies to patients in-place, while training students and fellows in remote patient care.

The Center will accelerate knowledge and intellectual property transfer between academia and industry through collaborative partnerships. This will promote rapid development of new technologies, and transform health care delivery by enhancing the quality of life of chronically-ill patients while reducing health care costs and preventing hospitalizations.

Student engagement in the proposed research projects will create opportunities with Center companies and organizations, and provide multidisciplinary participation at C2SHIP conferences and workshops. USC C2SHIP will recruit students and engage faculty in medicine, biomedical engineering, allied health. USC promotes an inclusive environment, allowing the Center to engage underrepresented individuals from diverse backgrounds.

Data produced from the projects will be housed in Center-wide servers at the C2SHIP Center using a password protected Box data sharing folder. Box is a cloud computing business which provides file-sharing, collaborating, and other tools for working with files that are uploaded to its servers. Data will be maintained for five years.

USC C2SHIP projects that collect patient data will be approved by USC IRB prior to project onset. All data will be deidentified, with no personal identifiers recorded or retained in any form.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.