At the Center for Remote Health Monitoring, we aim to advance the use of remote patient monitoring technologies for studying human health and improving patient outcomes.
- Our Center is inherently cross-disciplinary, composed of faculty and staff with broad clinical and technical expertise.
- We are united around a vision to become an internationally-recognized center that develops, evaluates, and deploys new user-centered technologies that can provide an unprecedented picture of a person’s health in their everyday life and potentially deliver tailored care immediately when it is needed.
- We benefit from, and contribute to, an emerging integrated healthcare system that cares for more than seven million patients in Illinois, Georgia, Alabama, Wisconsin, and the Carolinas.
- Our healthcare system provides a unique opportunity for conducting impactful digital health research at scale and for research translation.
Recent Center News
A research team from the Center for Remote Patient and Participant Monitoring have recently established a new research partnership with the Amos Cottage Therapeutic Day Program to better understand if wearable and environmental sensor data can measure and predict child outbursts. In an initial pilot study, the team will assess the feasibility and usability of sensors from Sibel Health for collecting objective measures of physiology and movement from children enrolled in the Therapeutic Day Program (TDP) at Amos Cottage. The TDP serves children experiencing significant social, emotional, and/or behavioral challenges that cause disruptions in their classroom setting.
“Our research team has used objective data from wearable sensors to identify emotional health disorders in young children and to predict emotional events (panic attacks) in adults. It’s exciting to put these components together and test the feasibility of detecting precursors of emotional outbursts in children and address a significant unmet need in this space” says Ellen McGinnis, PhD, Assistant Professor of Social Science and Health Policy and Pediatrics, and leader of this research project. Christine Erdie-Lalena, MD, Professor of Pediatrics, Medical Director at Amos Cottage, and Founder of the NC Development and Behavioral Pediatrics Network noted that this project “would be a groundbreaking discovery for our understanding of childhood behavior and mental health. I am excited that with the aid of cutting-edge technology we may be able to discover and predict childhood behaviors before they happen.”
The study will focus on the use of the wearable sensor, an ambient noise sensor and the child’s daily behaviors that will be clinically evaluated. “We are excited to participate in a research project that can help the treatment staff intensify interventions prior to a child becoming highly dysregulated!” said Mary Dame, Program Director for the Therapeutic Day Program at Amos Cottage. Further, Dr. Dame said that “we see this device as being instrumental for supporting children across settings including their home.” Researchers with the Center for Remote Patient and Participant Monitoring are hopeful that just-in-time interventions can keep children in their learning environments while reducing risks for other children and caregivers. “This project is a fantastic example of the type of research we champion in our Center – advancing the state of science of remote patient monitoring while also addressing a critical and unmet clinical need” said Ryan McGinnis, PhD, Director of the Center for Remote Patient and Participant Monitoring. “I’m looking forward to seeing the impact it can have on children, their classmates, parents, and providers.”
Ellen McGinnis, PhD., Assistant Professor in Social Science and Health Policy and in Pediatrics at Wake Forest University School of Medicine was accepted into the 2024 NIH mHealth Training Institute as a Training Institute Scholar out of UCLA. She was also selected as a 2024 CREW (Coaching and Resources for Entrepreneurial Women) program member at MUSC. As a member of these programs in the coming year she will receive training, resources, and networking opportunities in digital health translational research and biomedical entrepreneurship. The training and skills gained in these programs will be brought back to enhance the Center's mission, vision and goals.
The NIH mHealth Training Institute was created to bring together scientists from different disciplines including medicine, psychology, computer science and biomedical engineering, to develop mHealth solutions for some of the most challenging healthcare conditions. Multidisciplinary teams identify a health issue and work together to develop a mHealth solution.
Funded through an Innovative Program to Enhance Research Training (iPERT) grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, CREW aims to increase the number of women entrepreneurs in the field of biomedical science. In the 12-month program, members participate in skill building activities, receive mentoring from other biomedical entrepreneurs, receive professional coaching, and take part in MUSC’s Innovation Symposium. These activities are designed to advance early-stage female faculty and senior post-doctoral fellows into the field of entrepreneurship.
Dr. McGinnis is a clinical psychologist by training with over 10 years’ experience, assessing and treating young children with anxiety, depression and ADHD diagnoses. Her research is focused on developing digital health tools to improve mental health assessment and intervention. She is engaged in mHealth projects developing smartphone apps with corresponding wearable sensors to identify digital phenotypes of mental health diagnoses in early childhood; to detect stressful events and provide personalized recommendations for wellness activities in young adults, and to predict and intervene with biofeedback in panic attacks in adulthood.
