SAIL works with MED Campus Researchers to Create DASH App for e-Health

As chronic disease management becomes a growing concern for the medical industry, practitioners, patients, and payers are actively seeking new tools to drive down costs and improve treatment efficacy. One of the recent projects developed by BU’s Software & Application Innovation Lab (SAIL) is an app called Dietary Approaches to Stopping Hypertension (DASH). DASH is a mobile application designed to help people with high blood pressure control their diet. The software has Bluetooth features that are linked to a blood pressure machine, scale and pedometer; additionally, the app connects users with a health coach. Each health coach engages in six bi-weekly phone calls and can be reached through messaging as well. As Frederick Jansen, SAIL Software Engineer, notes,

“On one side of the spectrum you have highly personal, face-to-face contact with your care provider, which is limited in terms of frequency and data collection. On the other side a patient interacts with a fully automated application where all ‘personalized’ information is presented by a computer algorithm. DASH bridges the gap between these two and brings out the best of both: faster personalized feedback based on continuously collected data, with bi-weekly phone conversations for complex behavior change.”

The partnership between professional SAIL software developers and BU Medical Campus faculty researchers has successfully created a new model for delivering e-health to patients.

SAIL, located at the Hariri Institute for Computing, provides essential software design and development capacity in support of the growing computational and data-centric approaches and methodologies that permeate the landscape of academic disciplines. Andrei Lapets, Hariri Institute Director of Research Development, Computer Science lecturer and Acting Director of SAIL recognizes that,

“On both the Charles River and Medical Campuses, there is a tremendous variety of creative and innovative ideas, many involving or requiring data science techniques, computational thinking, or custom software development. At this time, a researcher may only be able to fully realize and execute their vision with the help of a flexible source of technical expertise, a resource that is willing to learn and adapt new technologies by working closely with that researcher. SAIL’s mission is to act as that resource.”

[Read more about DASH]

[Read more about SAIL]