National Cancer Institute Awards Charles River Analytics Funding to Develop Wearable Informatics
Charles River Analytics was awarded ~$400K contract from the National Cancer Institute to develop a privacy-preserving Wearable Health Informatics Platform for Extensible Research (WHISPER). WHISPER is an informatics tool for securely acquiring, querying, analyzing, and visualizing patient data. It integrates and harmonizes data from multiple wearable devices to measure cancer and symptom progression. WHISPER will support large-scale cancer research and improve health outcomes in cancer populations.WHISPER is compatible with smart watches and monitors, and boasts HIPAA-compliant data acquisition, transmission, storage, and retrieval.
An overview of the WHISPER data management platform. WHISPER provides extensible support for wearable and mobile devices to gather information about health and behavior during cancer survivorship. Researchers can use WHISPER to streamline their population health studies and synthesize data across devices, participants, and studies.
There is an increasing trend toward out-of-clinic research and patient assessment using passive, continuously measured data streams to measure cancer and symptom progression. This trend incorporates a growing number of wearables, which provide easy-to-use, clinically useful measures.
For this massive amount of data to be valuable, researchers also need scalable informatics tools that support data aggregation and integration across devices and manufacturers. Charles River Analytics has been developing tools that enable cancer survivors and their care teams to easily gather data outside the clinic.
“We are excited to partner with Tozny LLC and incorporate their effective, flexible tools that securely gather and manage sensitive health information,” said Dr. Aaron Winder, Biomedical Engineer and Principal Investigator for the project. “We are also continuing our work with experts at the University of Washington in the Department of Family Medicine, who are delivering vital expertise in population health research, clinical data informatics, and patient-centered cancer care.”
TozStore’s and TozID’s combined end-to-end encrypted data management and sophisticated identity and access management protocols ensure patient data is kept private and secure.
Tozny’s privacy and security technologies provide critical protection for user data and private information over the entire data lifecycle. In support of this effort for the National Cancer Institute, Tozny’s TozStore provides end-to-end data security and privacy using strong encryption to protect sensitive user information and data. TozID facilitates encryption-backed identity management to easily and securely manage private data in health studies and human subject research data collection. Tozny’s platform provides the means to securely manage access to collected research data and analysis methods—including no-human-in-the-loop methods for analysis of sensitive information.
“The promise of large-scale data analytics to improve health outcomes is an exciting advancement,” said Isaac Potoczny-Jones, Tozny’s founder and CEO. “Sensitive health data from our mobile devices must be managed to the highest security and privacy standards. Tozny is thrilled to once again collaborate with Charles River Analytics to bring our innovative and proven encryption and privacy technologies to bear in protecting people and their data. End-to-end encryption and identity management let us strictly control private data while providing access to researchers for their analytics algorithms.”
About Tozny
Tozny delivers Identity Management and Data Privacy solutions as a service and via SDKs to easily protect businesses, workforces, and individuals against data breaches and security threats. Built with technology developed for NIST, DHS, and DARPA-funded projects, Tozny brings the world’s most secure encryption solutions to all businesses that require secure, compliant applications that people can trust. Tozny was founded by leading cryptography experts from security research firm Galois in 2013 and is based in Portland, OR. Visit https://tozny.com to learn more.
This project has been funded in whole or in part with Federal funds from the National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, Department of Health and Human Services, under Contract No. 75N91020C00041.