The Hyve, King’s College London (KCL), and University College London (UCL) co-organized the first-ever RADAR-base Symposium earlier this month. The day-long event took place in London on the 7th of March at The Wellcome Collection. The in-person event was also streamed online for virtual participants.
RADAR-base (Remote Assessment of Disease And Relapses) is an open-source platform that leverages data from wearable devices and mobile technologies. The main focus of RADAR-base is the seamless integration of data streams from various wearable devices like Fitbit, Garmin etc. to collect sensor data in real-time and store, manage and share the collected data with researchers for retrospective analysis. The award-winning platform has been used in over 45 studies spanning 20 disease areas.
On the agenda were insightful keynote speeches, informative lightning talks, networking breaks, a poster session, and an award ceremony for the best poster and lightning talk. Here are some highlights and pictures of the day.
The symposium started with a welcome address by Amos Folarin, Informatics Software Development Group Leader at King’s College London (KCL), followed by a talk on the history and goals of the Innovative Health Initiative (IHI) by Colm Caroll, IHI Scientific Project Manager. IMI (Innovative Medicines Initiative), extended to IHI in January 2022, is the funding organization of both the RADAR-CNS and RADAR-AD consortiums.
The Hyve’s contribution
Our Marketing Executive, Jessica Singh, greeted the in-person attendees with a goodie bag from The Hyve. Maria Escala-Garcia, along with being an organizer for the event, chaired many of the lightning talks and keynote speeches. The first keynote speech of the day was given by Nivethika Mahasivam, Product Manager of RADAR-base at The Hyve. She introduced RADAR-base to the audience and gave an overview of the studies and disease areas that the platform has been used for so far.
Joris Borgdorff, Big Data & Internet of Things Software Architect who has specialized in RADAR-base, delivered a technical session on “Deploying and Configuring RADAR-base with Kubernetes” as well as a lightning talk on the RADAR-base pRMT (passive remote monitoring technologies) app for wearable device and smartphone sensor data collection. Peyman Mohtashami, our Software Engineer specializing in RADAR-base, delivered a virtual lightning talk on the aRMT (active remote monitoring technologies) app which has questionnaires that can be used for asking patients about their mood, medication intake, or the severity of symptoms.
Julia Kurps, Team Lead of RADAR-base and OHDSI at The Hyve, discussed the Next Steps and Roadmap of the RADAR-base community in an interactive session.
From King’s College London
Yuezhou Zhang, PhD Student from KCL, presented a second keynote speech on the Analysis of major depressive disorder using phone and wearable data from the RADAR-CNS study. Yatharth Ranjan, Software Engineer at KCL, presented two lightning talks, the first one about Feedback Mechanisms in the Lung Disease Study and the second one about a proof of concept for Integrating IoT Sensors into RADAR-base. Pauline Conde, a Software Developer at KCL, presented a lightning talk on the Dashboard functionality of RADAR-base that allows for data visualization through real-time dashboards.
Shaoxiong Sun, a Senior Research Associate, delivered a lightning talk on Using RMT to monitor people with different medical conditions before and during COVID-19”. Nickolas Cummins, Lecturer in AI for Speech Analysis for Health at King's College London, joined virtually to give a lightning talk on Using remotely collected audio data. PhD Student, Callum Stewart gave the closing keynote speech on The Covid Collab study - using wearable data to study the effects of COVID-19.
Richard Dobson, Professor of Medical Informatics & Head of Bioinformatics at KCL and Health Data Research UK (HDR UK), Institute of Health Informatics at UCL, chaired the lightning talks givenin the afternoon.
Other speakers
Mark Begale, Vice President at Vibrent Health, spoke about his experience with the All of Us Project. His company developed digital technologies for the project to make it easy for people in the United States of America to take part in the program. Eleni Kapousidou from the Dutch Centre for Human Drug Research (CHDR) joined virtually to speak about CHDR MORE, a customized solution based on RADAR-base for clinical trials in a home-based setting.
Winners of the Poster and Lightning Talk contest
The winner of the best poster was Valentina Ticcinelli, Biosensors Analytics Expert at UCB and the runner-up was Heet Sankesara, Research Software Engineer & Data Scientist, KCL. The posters that were submitted for the RADAR-base Symposium are shared here. Pauline Conde and Yatharth Ranjan, Software Engineers from KCL, tied for first place for the best lightning talk.
What the attendees thought
"RADAR-Symposium was a really fun and educational event. Not only did I learn a lot about the platform, but also met and talked to a lot of great people working on different projects on the platform. Overall, I hope we have this every year from now so that we can talk about all the new and exciting things happening in RADAR-Base and in the field of mHealth."
- Heet Sankesara, Research Software Engineer & Data Scientist, KCL
"Attending the RADAR-base symposium was a great experience. First of all, it was one of my first in-person events since the pandemic. It was nice to finally meet and discuss with colleagues in-person as opposed to the usual online setup. As a speaker, it was great to have been given the opportunity to speak about our work to everyone in the community. Seeing how much RADAR-base has evolved makes me really happy to be a part of it. It was also exciting to see future plans and features for the platform. I'm already looking forward to the next ones!"
- Pauline Conde, Software Engineer, KCL
You can watch the recordings of the talks from the RADAR-base Symposium on Youtube. The video of the first of the session can be found here and the second half of the Symposium can be found here.
On behalf of the organizers, we want to thank all the attendees who participated in the first-ever RADAR-base symposium, and we hope to see you again next year. It was very exciting to discuss with so many like-minded people how wearable data can be leveraged to improve health outcomes. We at The Hyve are very passionate about this process and will continue to support organizations in this journey. So feel free to reach out to us to discuss the RADAR-base platform further.
