NIDA Will Award Money to Researchers Who Build Apps for Addiction Research

The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) will award $100,000 to researchers who develop apps for addiction research, according to Fortune. The apps must be built using Apple’s medical research framework.

NIDA’s challenge, called “Addiction Research: There’s an App for that,” is requiring that app developers use Apple’s ResearchKit, an open-source software kit designed for biomedical and health research that is accessed through an iPhone. In a news release, NIDA says the goal of the challenge is to “create an app to be used by addiction researchers in future studies which will help to improve the scientific understanding of drug use and addiction.”

NIDA hopes the challenge will create apps that help advance scientific research in areas of nicotine, opioids, cannabinoids (including marijuana), methamphetamines and prescription drug use, the article notes.

The apps must allow researchers to engage “citizen scientists” and to recruit a large and varied number of willing study participants; present informed-consent materials; and collect data frequently on a broad range of variables.

The deadline for submissions is April 29, 2016. Winners will be announced in August 2016. There will be three prizes: $50,000 for first place; $30,000 for second place; and $20,000 for third place.

Apple’s ResearchKit was introduced in March. Scientists using the kit build an app to ask about a patient’s condition. As patients use the app, the data generated can be used to produce original scientific research. Researchers can use data from iPhones and Apple Watch such as GPS location and heart rate.

Earlier this year, researchers from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York released an app for people with asthma, which was downloaded by 50,000 people. Of those, 2,000 people contributed data on a regular basis.