Journal Article

Integrated Biomedical System version 1; peer review: 2 not approved

Harper, James, Shcherbina, Anna, Boettcher, Tara, Chiu, Nelson, Ricke, Darrell O

2018

Overview

Background: Capabilities for generating and storing large amounts of data relevant to individual health and performance are rapidly evolving and have the potential to accelerate progress toward quantitative and individualized understanding of many important issues in health and medicine. Recent advances in clinical and laboratory technologies provide increasingly complete and dynamic characterization of individual genomes, gene expression levels for genes, relative abundance of thousands of proteins, population levels for thousands of microbial species, quantitative imaging data, and more - all on the same individual.  Personal and wearable electronic devices are increasingly enabling these same individuals to routinely and continuously capture vast amounts of quantitative data including activity, sleep, nutrition, environmental exposures, physiological signals, speech, and neurocognitive performance metrics at unprecedented temporal resolution and scales. While some of the companies offering these measurement technologies have begun to offer systems for integrating and displaying correlated individual data, these are either closed/proprietary platforms that provide limited access to sensor data or have limited scope that focus primarily on one data domain (e.g. steps/calories/activity, genetic data, etc.). Methods: The Integrated Biomedical System is developed as a Ruby on Rails application with a relational database. Results: Data from multiple wearable monitors for activity, sleep, and physiological measurements, phone GPS tracking, individual genomics, air quality monitoring, etc. have been integrated into the Integrated Biomedical System. Conclusions: The Integrated Biomedical System is being developed to demonstrate an adaptable open-source tool for reducing the burden associated with integrating heterogeneous genome, interactome, and exposome data from a constantly evolving landscape of biomedical data generating technologies.  The Integrated Biomedical System provides a scalable and modular framework that can be extended to include support for numerous types of analyses and applications at scales ranging from personal users, communities and groups, to potentially large populations.