PHD: Predicting Health and Disease (PHD)
Predict if an individual soldier will develop an
infectious disease, prior to the onset of symptoms.
Principal Investigator:
Staff Members:
Current methods diagnose and treat individuals after they experience
symptoms and report to a physician.
The PHD Program seeks to alter this paradigm by identifying
changes in the baseline state of human health through frequent
surveillance. The vision is to maintain 100-percent warfighter readiness
by detecting, intervening, and eliminating disease before the emergence of
symptoms, potentially interrupting the course of outbreaks of flu
or other infectious diseases.
Achieving this goal will require a multidisciplinary approach to
diagnostics that includes, at the minimum, innovative data analytic
methodologies coupled with traditional and nontraditional medical
diagnostic parameters. Our end goal is to create the technological
breakthroughs required for the development of a field-portable,
point-of-care health assessment system that is able to
handle large throughput in short time spans (under a 3-hour turnaround),
at low costs.
In the much more distant future, we envision a very easy-to-use
relatively non invasive device able to predict the course
of disease, severity of symptoms, and infectiousness of the patient
with sample-to-prediction time of 10 minutes for $10. Getting
to this ambitious goal will require work beyond the scope of
the current DARPA PHD program funding.
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