The National Institutes of Health, under the National Library of Medicine’s program on data science research, awarded a $1.55 million grant to an interdisciplinary team lead by Luis Rocha, a professor of informatics, member of CNETS and the director of the NSF-NRT complex networks & systems program at the School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering. The four-year project, a collaboration between SICE and the Indiana University School of Nursing, will employ innovative data- and network-science methods to produce myAURA, an easy-to-use web service for epilepsy patients. myAURA will be based on a large-scale epilepsy knowledge graph built by integrating data from social media, electronic health records, patient discussion boards, scientific literature databases, advocacy websites, and mobile app data. The knowledge graph will, in turn, be used to fuel recommendation and visualization algorithms based on the automatic inference of relevant associations. The inference will follow algorithms developed by Rocha’s team to remove redundancy and extract factual information from large knowledge graphs as well as parsimonious network visualizations developed by Katy Börner, Distinguished Professor of Engineering & Information Science at SICE.
The project will also focus on user-centered development and pilot testing of myAURA to validate if and how it improves patient activation through a series of studies lead by Dr. Wendy Miller, Assistant Professor at the IU School of Nursing. “Our previous work on depression showed that it’s feasible to look at social media for health-related issues,” Rocha said. “The collaboration with Dr. Miller, who is an expert in epilepsy management, will allow us to translate our data and network science research, and develop personalized inferences useful to patients of this chronic disease.”