DTL partner The Hyve participates in RADAR-CNS. This recently started research project aims to develop new ways to monitor and treat brain disorders, in particular depression, multiple sclerosis (MS) and epilepsy. RADAR-CNS is an Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) project with a 22 million euro budget.
Kees van Bochove, founder of The Hyve, explains: “The goal of RADAR-CNS is to develop new ways to monitor relapses in brain diseases. We want to make smart use of data derived from wearable devices and other digital data sources such as smartphone data. This will give patients tools to manage their own health and -in the long term- prevent relapses.”
Open source infrastructure
Together with the other data processing partners such as King’s College London, Northwestern University and Intel, The Hyve will build an open source infrastructure for the processing of data from wearable devices. This infrastructure will be used for a number of clinical studies in the project. The architecture is still under construction, but it is likely to include:
- OpenmHealth Shimmer (for connecting to cloud APIs from existing devices) and Purple Robot (for data collection from sensors on the mobile phones);
- Apache Kafka, possibly together with Apache Storm or Apache Spark Streaming, to collect and process the data;
- Hadoop HDFS to persist the data and to provide a storage layer;
- TranSMART as an analysis data warehouse to combine processed wearables data with clinical data endpoints.
Variable endpoints
Kees van Bochove: “The medical endpoints we will be using in RADAR-CNS vary a bit between the diseases. For example, epilepsy uses the video EEG as a golden standard. This is a device that is not very portable! So for epilepsy, the first RADAR-CNS goal is to find a combination of sensors that can approximate similar readouts to register seizures. For depression on the other hand, the range of relevant digital data streams is much more broad, varying from activity data and other body sensor read-outs to audio processing of voice messages and email usage. For MS, a complicating factor is that patients in more advanced stages are not very mobile, and might have trouble putting on devices, charging them, etc. Overall, it’s clear that we will very much need the multidisciplinary collaboration between the top clinicians, device engineers and software engineers that we have in the consortium to realise the project goals!”