Seattle, WA – , an open source platform developed by Sage Bionetworks, that transforms smartphones into research tools for monitoring mood and cognitive health, is joining the (GRIP).

GRIP will encourage the widespread adoption of Bridge to overcome some of the most challenging hurdles facing clinical trials and accelerate the digital revolution in clinical research to advance scientific breakthroughs.

The platform’s innovation lies in its ability to enable clinical scientists, researchers, and clinical trial investigators to continuously and securely monitor, transmit, store, and analyze nuanced, multimodal health data collected by the smart phones of people participating in research studies. With participant consent, it enables the collection of both active and passive assessments such as a patient’s movement, voice acoustics, and typing dynamics.

“For over a decade, Bridge has enabled hundreds of academics and industry researchers to seamlessly collect data on research participants’ everyday cognitive functioning—data that is hard to make sense of, but so important for contextualizing diagnosis and personalizing prognosis and treatment,” said Dr. Luca Foschini, president and CEO of Sage Bionetworks. “We’re excited to see how researchers put this tool to use to better serve patients.”

Bridge was one of the first platforms of its kind to collect, transmit, and analyze health-related smartphone keyboard data thanks to a partnership between , a nonprofit biomedical research institute which had pioneered the platform, and a team of researchers led by Dr. Alex Leow, at the University of Illinois Chicago.

While playing her piano in 2015, Dr. Leow realized that how well she played each day varied and reflected her mental state. Inspired by health trackers, she wondered if her use of the keyboard on the smartphone in her pocket also reflected her mental state.

Dr. Leow and her colleagues collaborated with the team at Sage Bionetworks to expand the nascent Bridge platform to accommodate this research query.

The result is a flexible and robust platform that can serve as a foundation for a wide variety of research.

The Bridge platform currently supports Dr. Leow’s innovative citizen science research app, , which Dr. Leow has dubbed “a fitness tracker for your brain.”

The Bridge tool represents “a real paradigm shift in how we diagnose, monitor, and select treatments for a broad range of conditions, from Alzheimer’s to cancer and depression,” said Dr. Leanne Williams, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University, who is leading a clinical trial of depression that relies on the BiAffect/Bridge technology. “There is huge potential.”

Indeed, Bridge’s shift to GRIP comes at a time of unprecedented interest in incorporating technology into medical research, care, and prevention. With an estimated of the global population owning a smart phone with multiple sensors, the potential impact of Bridge is tremendous, said Dr. Rhoda Au, a professor at Boston University’s schools of medicine and health, an advisor to GRIP, and principal investigator of the Framingham Heart Study Brain Aging Program.

The Bridge platform’s open-source technology democratizes access to research tools, noted GRIP advisor Dr. Au. "This helps us get to equal opportunity science, which will accelerate research.”

Au’s own team at the Framingham Heart Study Brain Aging Program is currently considering incorporating Bridge into their research.

Bridge’s new home, , is a research platform that supports a suite of tools to help researchers around the world conduct analysis of digital, imaging, and ‘omics data to better understand complex biological processes, identify disease biomarkers, and catalyze biomedical discovery. GRIP’s work addresses research gaps and accelerates scientific analysis workflows. GRIP is currently exploring options to integrate the Bridge technology with its existing digital data collection stack.

GRIP is enabled by , , , , , , , , , , , , , , and the . 

To learn more about Bridge or GRIP or become a part of the growing Bridge or GRIP research community, visit  or e-mail .