NEWS

The establishment of IFH was covered in Becker’s Health IT News. Here is the summary:

The University of California Irvine established a new innovation institute focused on personalizing the healthcare model with consumer technologies including wearables and mobile phones.

The Institute for Future Health at the University of California Irvine will combine clinical work with research on lifestyle, community, environment and socioeconomic factors to tailor healthcare to individual patients.

“Our approach is to understand the lifestyle and environmental factors as they affect an individual and use them to build a personal model that will steer one’s health state to meet an individual’s goals,” institute director Ramesh Jain said in a Feb. 4 news release. “This requires collecting real-time lifestyle and environment data in real-life situations [and] that we build an infrastructure to simultaneously do research and translation rather than first doing research and then translation.”

Institute members are developing technologies that use a person’s health and lifestyle data from the following sources: mobile phones, wearables, personal sensors, diagnostic tests and medical records. The data gathered will be combined with research insights to create personalized lifestyle guidance to help patients meet their health goals.