Monday, December 12, 2011

WPI team gets $1.2M from NSF for diabetes care app

By Rodney Brown

The National Science Foundation has awarded $1.2 million to a research team at Worcester Polytechnic Institute to make a smart phone application so people with advanced diabetes and foot ulcers can better manage their disease.

The project will run for four years and is being managed by WPI’s Healthcare Delivery Institute, the Worcester-based university said in a release. Two of the founding members of HDI, professors Diane Strong and Bengisu Tulu, will lead the research team. Strong is a professor in WPI’s School of Business and a health information technology expert, and Tulu is an assistant professor at business school and also a health IT expert.

In addition to Strong and Tulu, also on the team are Emmanuel Agu, an associate professor of computer science at WPI, who will lead the software development for the new application, and Peder Pedersen, professor of electrical and computer engineering at WPI, who will work with the HDI team and direct the image processing component of the application. The idea is to create an app, currently with the working title “sugar,” which will integrate a smartphone wirelessly with a personal glucose meter and scale. 

WPI is working with diabetes and wound care specialists at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester on the project, the release noted. The UMass Medical School group includes Dr. David Harlan, co-director of the Diabetes Center of Excellence at UMass Memorial Medical Center; Dr. Raymond Dunn, professor of surgery and chief of plastic and reconstructive surgery at the medical center; Ronald Ignotz, adjunct professor of cell biology and research scientist in the Department of Surgery; and Sherry Pagoto, associate professor of medicine and a licensed clinical psychologist at the UMass Memorial Weight Center.

Last month medical device startup MedicaMetrix scored top honors, and a $10,000 award, at the inaugural WPI Venture Forum Business Plan Contest Life Sciences Track competition. In September, WPI launched new interdisciplinary undergraduate and graduate programs in the fields of bioinformatics and computational biology, making it the only New England school offering a combined BS/MS program in the field.