Due: To be presented on November 30th, December 5th, and December 7th, 2023

It is not by the matter of random chance that in this course you are being exposed to three different areas of biomedical informatics — Bioinformatics, Consumer Health Informatics, and Clinical Informatics. This was made by design: biomedical informatics in the real world is very interdisciplinary. To make a real impact in health, one has to think outside the box of their specialty, learn about methods and ideas of other research fields, and collaborate with other researchers that can bring their own viewpoint to the table. A great deal of major scientific advances stems from investigators learning how to do just that, sustainably and repeatedly. Throughout your careers, whatever aspect of science they may touch, you will acquire this invaluable skill. This project is your first step on this exciting journey.

Your task is to design a study that integrates at least two of the three modules from this course to solve a real-world health problem. By doing so, you will integrate different topics you have learned in the course into a collaborative research project. Final delivery will consist of a presentation where you pitch your research ideas, advocating for the significance of a problem, proposing a potential solution, the benefit of a multimodal or cross-disciplinary approach to that solution, and anticipated challenges. The problem should be specific: choose a disease or problem area that you would like to focus on, and how different topics from the course can help tackle a problem within that domain.

For some examples, think about how you would approach the following tasks: 

• Integrate and analyze clinical and omics for a targeted prediction? 
• Design a mobile health app to deliver patient recommendations based on a set of clinical observations? 
• Build a clinical decision support tool integrating biomarker data? 

Your project should detail the following:

• Modules: Explicitly state which modules from the course you are incorporating 
• Problem: What problem are you addressing? Are you focusing on a disease, behavior? 
• Current approaches: What current approaches exist? What are you improving on? 
• Population: Who would benefit from your solution? 
• Data: What data is available to you? Are there privacy concerns? Can these data sources be integrated, and how? 
• Methods: What is your proposed solution? How will you achieve it?
• Evaluation: How will you assess the success of your solution? 
• Delivery method: what is your deliverable? Who will it be provided to, and how? 

Groups: Groups will be assigned by the instructor to ensure collaboration among students on different tracks and departments. 

Format of the presentation: TBD