BiAffect backend provider Bridge, an open platform developed by Sage Bionetworks that transforms wearables & smartphones into research tools, is joining GRIP

GRIP (the Global Research & Imaging Platform) will encourage the widespread adoption of Bridge to overcome some of the most challenging hurdles facing clinical trials and accelerate the digital revolution in clinical research, to advance scientific breakthroughs.
The Bridge platform’s innovation lies in its ability to enable scientists, researchers, and clinical trial investigators to continuously and securely monitor, transmit, store, and analyze nuanced, multimodal health data collected by the smart phones of people participating in research studies. With participant consent, it enables the collection of both active and passive assessments ranging from digital cognitive assessments to monitoring of patients’ movement, voice acoustics, and typing dynamics through a smartphone app. Researchers can utilize open, available assessments and passive monitors that have already been implemented in the platform or develop their own.
“For over a decade, Bridge has enabled hundreds of academics and industry researchers to seamlessly collect data on research participants’ everyday life, how they feel and function, data that is hard to make sense of but so important for contextualizing diagnosis and personalizing prognosis and treatment,” said Dr. Luca Foschini, president and CEO of Sage Bionetworks. “We’re excited to see how researchers put this tool to use to serve patients better.”
Bridge was one of the first platforms of its kind to collect, transmit, and analyze health-related smartphone keyboard data thanks to a partnership between Sage Bionetworks, a nonprofit biomedical research institute which had pioneered the platform, and a team of researchers led by Dr. Alex Leow, at the University of Illinois Chicago. The Bridge platform currently supports Dr. Leow’s citizen science research app, BiAffect.com, which Dr. Leow has dubbed “a fitness tracker for your brain.”
The Bridge tool represents “a real paradigm shift in how we diagnose, monitor, and select treatments for a broad range of conditions, from Alzheimer’s to cancer and depression,” said Dr. Leanne Williams at Stanford University, who is leading a clinical trial of depression that relies on the BiAffect/Bridge technology. "There is huge potential."
The Bridge platform’s free, open-source technology democratizes access to research tools, noted GRIP advisor Dr. Rhoda Au of Boston University. "This helps us get to equal opportunity science, which will accelerate research.”
Bridge’s new home, GRIP, is a research platform that supports a suite of tools to help researchers conduct analysis of digital, imaging, and ‘omics data, to understand complex biological processes better, identify disease biomarkers, and catalyze biomedical discovery.

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