NIH Participating in Smart Health and Biomedical Research Interagency Program with National Science Foundation

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) recently announced a new interagency funding opportunity with the National Science Foundation (NSF) in a “Notice of NIH Participation in Smart Health and Biomedical Research in the Era of Artificial Intelligence and Advanced Data Science” (NOT-OD-21-011). The notice expands on a previous interagency program on Smart and Connected Health (NOT-OD-18-149).

Twenty-two of the 27 NIH institutes and centers have signed on to this expanded initiative, which supports innovative, high-risk/high-reward research with the promise of disruptive transformations in biomedical research. The general interests of the participating NIH institute organizations are outlined in the notice.

The solicitation aims to address technological and data science challenges that require fundamental research and development of new tools, workflows and methods across many dimensions including but not limited to:

• Information infrastructure – fundamental research in data management.
• Transformative data science – development of novel computational approaches.
• Novel multimodal sensor system hardware – to develop predictive and personalized models of health.
• Effective usability – including ethical, behavioral and social considerations.
• Automating health – to enable interoperable, temporally synchronized, devices and systems.
• Medical image interpretation – to inform and improve use and development of presentation modalities.
• Unpacking health disparities – to develop holistic, data-driven or mathematical models to address the structural and/or social determinants of health.

Traditional disease-centric medical, clinical, pharmacological, biological or physiological studies and evaluations are outside the scope of this solicitation.

Interested investigators can join a webinar on Dec. 21 at 3 p.m. ET hosted by NSF to learn more about the interagency opportunity. The NSF solicitation is also available on their website.

The first proposal deadline for the new opportunity is Feb. 16, 2021.