The PeerJ “Human Motion Project” collection: the 3rd winter symposium of the Human Motion Project

We are pleased to announce that the PeerJ “HumanMotion Project” collection is growing and will be the platform to host abstracts, presentations, preprints and papers of the third Winter Symposium of the Human Motion Project jointly organized by the Human Motion Institute, TUM, LMU, and DLR, on March 11th 2016, in Munich, Germany. These submissions will be added to those published in PeerJ’s human motion collection for the second and first Winter Symposium of the Human Motion Project, from 2014 and 2015.

We asked Martin Daumer, co-organizer of the symposium, to write a guest blog post explaining some of the motivation for this collection.

Dr. Daumer’s guest blog post is below:

“Back in 2010 the following consensus statement from the preparatory conference “ACCELEROMICS MEETS GENOMICS – Physical activity and genes for personalized medicine –results from an international expert panel meeting” was published: “Mobile accelerometry has great potential for improving human health by contributing to the diagnosis of gait and balance disorders in daily life and clinical practice, improving outcome measures in chronic disabling diseases as well as a tool for prescribing and monitoring exercise therapy. It also provides the potential for greater insight into associations between physical activity and disease risks eg, cardiovascular disease either independently or through interaction with genetic variants. Standardization of sampling methods, data formats and validation rules for assessing performance are needed, and sharing and publishing raw data would be advantageous, but entails difficult IP issues. At a later stage decision-support tools may couple information about lifestyle including physical activity profiles and risk genes. This will most likely start with prediction of responders/non-responders to treatment and rare diseases with a strong genetic background component. Independent assessment of the impact of the technologies and tools in clinical practice is desirable.”

The vision of the Human Motion Project is to become a successful analogue of the Human Genome Project: improving human health by an open collaborative technology platform for the mobile medical monitoring of human motion. The basis is a growing “critical path toolbox” and a biomedical data warehouse for collecting, archiving, analyzing, and disseminating human motion data including a library of algorithms.

In the “3rd Winter symposium of the human motion project” we’ll pick out walking as “pars pro toto”. “Walking is man’s best medicine” was known in ancient Greece (Hippokrates – c. 460 – c. 370 BC) – but is it really true? How would one measure and determine the right – effective and safe – dose for an individual and how would one measure the outcome? Mobile sensors, in particular mobile accelerometers that can measure various aspects of physical activity in the clinic and the “real world”, will probably play an important role in this field. As a fundamental element of “human motion” we will focus during this day on various aspects and consequences of walking/not walking for human health – with or without drug treatment. We’ll go from the clinical aspects to computational aspects (devices/sensors, data, algorithms, analysis, transmission) to the very important regulatory aspects of clinical trials and medical devices (safety, efficacy, feasibility). Experts from University hospitals, research centers, rehabilitations centers, manufacturers of medical devices, pharmaceutical companies, patients* and regulatory bodies will cover the broad spectrum of topics with a clear focus: to help the field to jointly establish a new set of meaningful clinical endpoints linked to objective measures of human motion.

We are very pleased to see that we have again a contribution from the regulatory side (see here last year’s contribution Regulator’s view on the scientific and regulatory challenges in new mobility outcomes & PROs by Gabriele Schlosser-Weber). The EMA is also actively working on extending the collaboration framework with academia http://www.ema.europa.eu/docs/en_GB/document_library/Other/2016/02/WC500200827.pdf

Abstracts and Talks are expected to be published by our partner PeerJ in the “human motion collection”, as in previous symposia and workshops. https://peerj.com/collections/6-humanmotionproject/

As more preprints are submitted, or peer-reviewed PeerJ articles accepted and published, then they will be automatically added to this growing body of work.

About last year’s conference…

Feedback from a participant: “I can say that from personal experience (I gave a talk last year) that the symposium was excellent, not least because of the very diverse/multi-functional audience – I had not been to other events where the full spectrum of contributors to the “digital health” field was represented, everyone from students with next-next-next-generation prototype devices to clinicians to the EMA.”

Publication about the previous conference by Kathrin Ernsting: “Reality instead of lab conditions“.

For more information about PeerJ Collections, or to learn how they can be an ideal publishing solution for your conference or symposia, check out this blog post.