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

Hospitalization costs in the United States are among the world’s highest. However, such costs do not reflect highest quality of care, particularly for chronic health conditions. Immediate action is needed to shift from a model relying on care in hospital settings, to a model in which patients manage their health from home.

The Center to Stream Healthcare In Place (C2SHIP) unites the best minds in medicine and bioengineering with leaders in biomedical research and industry, to develop and promote in-place care technologies. 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.

C2SHIP will accelerate innovation through partnerships, multi-specialty collaborations, resource sharing, and educating workforce to promote self-care technologies.

The Center’s trans-disciplinary team will pursue research and development in new sensors, wearable technology, system integration, intelligent data mining, and comprehensive data visualization. Through “Digital Health”, patient data can be streamed to medical professionals at remote locations, establishing a mobile hub for vulnerable patients in their own home, and personalizing care coordination.

C2SHIP will focus on mitigating physiological, environmental, and psychological changes for timely management and intervention. Caltech will focus on developing new materials, devices, and artificial intelligence tools for data analysis and visualization. Caltech will collaborate with other sites for the clinical evaluation of the developed technologies.

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. Caltech will recruit students and engage faculty across Divisions, e.g., in engineering, chemistry and biology. Caltech promotes an inclusive environment, allowing the Center to engage underrepresented individuals from diverse backgrounds.

Data produced from the projects will be housed at C2SHIP Center’s shared servers 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.

Caltech’s projects that collect patient data will be approved by its IRB office 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.