Smart and Connected Health Projects: Characteristics and Research Challenges

The Smart and Connected Health (SCH) program at the National Science Foundation (NSF) has been established as a stand-alone solicitation since 2012. This article reviews and analyzes the 100 projects that have been funded since 2012 to understand their characteristics and the research challenges they have addressed in SCH. Descriptive analysis, topic analysis based on Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), and comparative content analysis were performed. Our study indicated that NSF SCH projects, featured with collaborative and multidisciplinary research endeavor, have been exploring more than 36 diseases or health problems, and five major research challenges including electronic health record (HER) data processing, system design or computational model building, personalized or patient-centered medicine, training and education, and privacy preserving. Much more research projects are needed to investigate algorithms, devices, and impacts of smart health on diseases and communities.