WideHealth Seminars with Stefan Konigorski, "StudyU: A platform for conducting digital N-of-1 trials that link personalized medicine and population health research"

This podcast is part of the "WideHealth Seminars". This project (widehealth.eu) has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 952279

Speaker: Stefan Konigorski 

Title:  StudyU: A platform for conducting digital N-of-1 trials that link personalized medicine and population health research   

Abstract: Traditionally, effect estimates of health interventions have been obtained from studies of large groups of individuals. However, the derived average effects do not allow meaningful insights on whether an intervention will help a given individual – which is at the center of personalized medicine. We have developed the StudyU platform (arxiv.org/abs/2012.14201) which allows evaluating the effectiveness of health interventions on an individual level by digitally designing, publishing, and conducting so-called N-of-1 trials. In N-of-1 trials, every participant compares different health interventions of interest over time. The data generated from N-of-1 trials are hence single time series, usually within complex causal graphs, and the goal is to test interpretable effects of the interventions. The power of N-of-1 trials can be further enhanced by including sensor data to measure health outcomes. In this talk, I will introduce N-of-1 trials and the StudyU platform, present some of our work on the statistical methods for the analysis and discuss how the StudyU platform might be helpful in bridging individual-level and population-level studies by aggregating multiple N-of-1 trials.  

Short Bio: Stefan Konigorski, PhD, is a Senior Researcher in the Digital Health & Machine Learning chair at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam Germany, where he leads the Health Intervention Analytics lab. He is also Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Genetics and Genomic Sciences Department at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. He develops statistical and machine learning methods to derive causal effects from complex observational and experimental studies, with a specific research focus on investigating personalized health trajectories and digital health interventions by using N-of-1 trials and adaptive trials.