Skip to main content
NIH Intramural Research Program, Our Research Changes Lives

Navigation controls

  • Search
  • Menu

Social follow links

  • Podcast
  • Instagram
  • Twitter
  • YouTube
  • LinkedIn

Main navigation

  • About Us
    • What Is the IRP?
    • History
    • Honors
      • Nobel Prize
      • Lasker Award
      • Breakthrough Prize
      • Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE)
      • Presidential Medal of Freedom
      • National Medal of Science
      • Searle Scholars
      • The National Academy of Sciences
      • The National Academy of Medicine
      • The National Academy of Engineering
      • The American Academy of Arts and Sciences
      • National Medal of Technology & Innovation
      • Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medals
      • Crafoord Prize
      • Fellows of the Royal Society
      • Canada Gairdner Awards
    • Organization & Leadership
    • Our Programs
      • NCI
      • NEI
      • NHGRI
      • NHLBI
      • NIA
      • NIAAA
      • NIAID
      • NIAMS
      • NIBIB
      • NICHD
      • NIDA
      • NIDCD
      • NIDCR
      • NIDDK
      • NIEHS
      • NIMH
      • NIMHD
      • NINDS
      • NINR
      • NLM
      • CC
      • NCATS
      • NCCIH
    • Research Campus Locations
    • Contact Information
  • Our Research
    • Scientific Focus Areas
      • Biomedical Engineering & Biophysics
      • Cancer Biology
      • Cell Biology
      • Chemical Biology
      • Chromosome Biology
      • Clinical Research
      • Computational Biology
      • Developmental Biology
      • Epidemiology
      • Genetics & Genomics
      • Health Disparities
      • Immunology
      • Microbiology & Infectious Diseases
      • Molecular Biology & Biochemistry
      • Molecular Pharmacology
      • Neuroscience
      • RNA Biology
      • Social & Behavioral Sciences
      • Stem Cell Biology
      • Structural Biology
      • Systems Biology
      • Virology
    • Principal Investigators
      • View by Investigator Name
      • View by Scientific Focus Area
    • Accomplishments
      • View All Accomplishments by Date
      • View All Health Topics
      • The Body
      • Health & Wellness
      • Conditions & Diseases
      • Procedures
    • Accelerating Science
      • Investing in Cutting-Edge Animal Models
      • Creating Cell-Based Therapies
      • Advancing Computational and Structural Biology
      • Combating Drug Resistance
      • Developing Novel Imaging Techniques
      • Charting the Pathways of Inflammation
      • Zooming in on the Microbiome
      • Uncovering New Opportunities for Natural Products
      • Stimulating Neuroscience Research
      • Pursuing Precision Medicine
      • Unlocking the Potential of RNA Biology and Therapeutics
      • Producing Novel Vaccines
    • Research in Action
      • View All Stories
      • Too Much of a Good Thing
      • Turning Face Perception on Its Head
      • Safeguarding a Second Chance at Life
      • A Biological Betrayal
    • Trans-IRP Research Resources
      • Supercomputing
    • IRP Review Process
    • Commercializing Inventions
  • NIH Clinical Center
    • Clinical Center Facilities
    • Advancing Translational Science
    • Clinical Trials
      • Get Involved with Clinical Research
      • Physician Resources
  • News & Events
    • In the News
    • I am Intramural Blog
    • Speaking of Science Podcast
    • SciBites Video Shorts
    • The NIH Catalyst Newsletter
    • Events
  • Careers
    • Faculty-Level Scientific Careers
    • Trans-NIH Scientific Recruitments
      • Stadtman Tenure-Track Investigators
        • Science, the Stadtman Way
        • Earl Stadtman Investigator Frequently Asked Questions
      • Lasker Clinical Research Scholars
      • Independent Research Scholar
    • Scientific & Clinical Careers
    • Administrative Careers
  • Research Training
    • Program Information
    • Training Opportunities
    • NIH Work/Life Resources
The NIH Catalyst: A Publication About NIH Intramural Research

National Institutes of Health • Office of the Director | Volume 28 Issue 6 • November–December 2020

Technology Transfer: mHealth

Mobile Technologies Revolutionize Care for People with Substance–Use Disorders

BY DIPTADIP DATTAROY, NCI TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER CENTER

Mobile-health technology (mHealth) lets health-care providers collect data on handheld electronic devices such as cell phones or tablets and use those data to predict the optimal timing for delivering treatments and health-education messages to patients. Researchers at the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) have developed an mHealth platform for promoting psychological wellbeing in people suffering from opioid-use disorders: Mobile devices can monitor a patient’s location and intermittently ask questions about their psychological status, predict psychosocial stress, and also deliver warnings and automated therapeutic messages that can help prevent a recovering addict from relapsing into drug use.

Kenzie Preston

Kenzie Preston has invented a mobile health technology that uses mobile devices to deliver warnings and therapeutic messages to help prevent recovering addicts from relapsing into drug use.

The journey to this innovation began in 2005 when NIDA Senior Investigator Kenzie L. Preston (recently made scientist emeritus) and her team began using a sort of real-time electronic diary—called ecological momentary assessment (EMA)—for 114 opioid-abusing outpatients being treated with methadone to report their activities and moods for up to 20 weeks. EMA had been used to study tobacco addiction but rarely opioid addiction. The researchers reported that the individuals used the mobile devices to provide self-reported data in their daily environments and that the data revealed behavioral patterns that led up to drug craving and use. The findings were published in 2009 in the Archives of General Psychiatry (Arch Gen Psychiatry 66:88–94, 2009).

In another study, published in 2014, Preston’s team collected time-stamped Global Positioning System (GPS) data and Ecological Momentary Assessment ratings of mood, stress, and drug cravings at random times over 16 weeks of 27 urban drug misusers receiving methadone treatment. The participants were given PalmPilots that they used to answer questions about drug cravings, stress, and their location; they also carried small GPS devices. The researchers also used a novel observational environmental-assessment tool, the Neighborhood Inventory for Environmental Typology, to evaluate data in relation to environmental cues (Drug Alcohol Depend 134:22–29, 2014).

Smart phone with a question on it.

Data can be unobstruvely collected on smartphones and used to predict drug cravings and deliver therapeutic messages and interventions to people recovering from substance-use disorders.

These initial experiments led to developing a tool that can unobtrusively collect data on smartphones and use them to predict drug cravings in people recovering from substance-use disorders before it’s too late. In 2015, Preston along with NIDA researchers David H. Epstein, Matthew Tyburski, and Massoud Vahabzadeh developed an mHealth platform that uses machine-learning technology and smartphones to continuously collect and monitor patient-specific ambulatory data, process it in a cloud-based server, predict a user’s psychological status, and deliver automated interventions when needed. Such interventions include warning a patient in recovery when they are at especially high risk of experiencing a negative event that might cause them to relapse. Through numerous repetitions of processing such information, the mHealth platform would become increasingly accurate over time. A U.S. provisional patent application and an international patent application were filed on this technology in 2015 and 2016, respectively. In 2017, a U.S. patent application was filed on the same invention.

In a recent clinical study, Preston and her team tested a prototype of this mobile app on 189 outpatients being treated for opioid-use disorders and analyzed the data using NIH’s High-Performance Computing facility Biowulf. The mHealth platform accurately predicted the probability of opioid craving or stress up to 90 minutes before the craving began (NPJ Digit Med 3:26, 2020).

This mHealth technology could revolutionize the clinical care for patients diagnosed with substance-use disorders, posttraumatic stress disorder, depression, or other mental-health disorders. Preston is hopeful that this mHealth platform would drastically reduce health-care costs and improve patient outcomes. This tool could also be used to study the effect of nongenetic influences, such as environmental exposures, on human health. NIDA is seeking licensing and/or codevelopment partners to further develop and commercialize this mHealth platform.


To learn about technology transfer activities at NIH, go to the Office of Technology Transfer’s website at https://www.ott.nih.gov. To learn about becoming a Technology Transfer Ambassador, go to techtransfer.cancer.gov/aboutttc/ambassadors. In addition, you can read the NIH Catalyst story on Tech Transfer (May–June 2019 issue).


Diptadip Dattaroy

Diptadip Dattaroy, who has a Ph.D. in environmental health sciences, was previously a postdoctoral fellow in the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive Diseases (2017–2020) and NCI Technology Transfer Ambassador. He is now a fellow in the National Cancer Institute’s Technology Transfer Center, which manages the technology-transfer activities for NIDA and other institutes. Diptadip is passionate about bringing new health-care technologies from labs to patients. Outside of work, he enjoys reading fiction, hiking, gardening, and painting.

This page was last updated on Monday, March 21, 2022

  • Issue Overview
  • Features
    • NHGRI Scientists Study Ancient Dog Breed
    • Resistance to the Plague May Be a Double-Edged Sword
    • Highlighting NIH’s Outstanding Women Fellows
    • COVID-19 Timeline at NIH (September–October 2020)
    • Joan Steitz’s WALS Lecture on Viral Noncoding RNAs
  • Departments
    • From the Deputy Director for Intramural Research
    • Alumni News: Andrea Pfeifer
    • Research Briefs
    • Colleagues: Recently Tenured
    • Announcements: Kudos
    • The Training Page
    • News You Can Use: Cyber Safety
    • The SIG Beat
    • News You Can Use: National Death Index
    • Technology Transfer: mHealth
    • From the Annals of NIH History
    • Photographic Moment
    • Announcements
  • Issue Contents
  • Download this issue as a PDF

Catalyst menu

  • Current Issue
  • Previous Issues
  • About The NIH Catalyst
  • Contact The NIH Catalyst
  • Share Your Story
  • NIH Abbreviations

Catalyst links

  • Follow The NIH Catalyst

Subscribe Today!

Subscribe to The NIH Catalyst Newsletter and receive email updates.

Subscribe

Get IRP Updates

Subscribe

  • Email
  • Print
  • Share Twitter Facebook LinkedIn

Main navigation

  • About Us
    • What Is the IRP?
    • History
    • Honors
    • Organization & Leadership
    • Our Programs
    • Research Campus Locations
    • Contact Information
  • Our Research
    • Scientific Focus Areas
    • Principal Investigators
    • Accomplishments
    • Accelerating Science
    • Research in Action
    • Trans-IRP Research Resources
    • IRP Review Process
    • Commercializing Inventions
  • NIH Clinical Center
    • Clinical Center Facilities
    • Advancing Translational Science
    • Clinical Trials
  • News & Events
    • In the News
    • I am Intramural Blog
    • Speaking of Science Podcast
    • SciBites Video Shorts
    • The NIH Catalyst Newsletter
    • Events
  • Careers
    • Faculty-Level Scientific Careers
    • Trans-NIH Scientific Recruitments
    • Scientific & Clinical Careers
    • Administrative Careers
  • Research Training
    • Program Information
    • Training Opportunities
    • NIH Work/Life Resources
  • Department of Health and Human Services
  • National Institutes of Health
  • USA.gov

Footer

  • Home
  • Contact Us
  • IRP Brand Materials
  • HHS Vulnerability Disclosure
  • Web Policies & Notices
  • Site Map
  • Search