# The Spine Phenome Project: Enabling Technology for Personalized Medicine

> **NIH NIH UH3** · OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY · 2021 · $3,074,856

## Abstract

Project Summary/Abstract
Chronic Low Back Pain (cLBP) is a debilitating condition that affects millions of people globally. Despite
increased utilization of interventions and rising medical costs, cLBP prevalence has continued to increase. This
problem arises because cLBP is complex, heterogeneous and current diagnostics and treatments rely primarily
on subjective metrics and do not target all the multidimensional biopsychosocial mechanisms associated with
cLBP. Specifically, most diagnostics do not quantitively consider patient functional measures. This
multidisciplinary effort proposes to address this problem by developing and validating a digital health platform
and provide meaningful data-driven metrics that enable an integrated approach to clinical evaluation and
treatment of cLBP. This platform will facilitate the use of quantitative spinal motion metrics (function), PROs
and patient preference information to enable deep patient phenotyping and inform clinical decision-making on
personalized treatments in order to improve outcomes. This effort will involve software and hardware
development to enable data collection, analysis and visualization in clinical settings. Technology development
effort will be done in partnership with Switchbox Inc. (Software Strategy) and Priority Designs Inc. (Regulatory
Strategy). The specific aims for UH2 phase are to: 1) Develop a Digital health platform for collecting, analyzing,
and reporting core cLBP metrics; 2) Conduct a feasibility study to test the clinical operability, usability and utility
of the prototype; and the specific Aims for UH3 phase are to: 1) Optimize Digital Health Platform for translation
to clinical research use through BACPAC; 2) Validate the utility of the Digital Health Platform to identify cLBP
patient phenotypes and inform clinical decision-making on optimal treatment pathways for individual patients.
The outcome of this project will be a digital health platform with data to support regulatory submission for
clinical use. At the end of this effort, we will have a validated tool for integration in clinical research studies
supported by the BACPAC consortium.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10375971
- **Project number:** 4UH3AR076729-02
- **Recipient organization:** OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY
- **Principal Investigator:** Safdar N. Khan
- **Activity code:** UH3 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2021
- **Award amount:** $3,074,856
- **Award type:** 4N
- **Project period:** 2019-09-26 → 2025-08-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10375971

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10375971, The Spine Phenome Project: Enabling Technology for Personalized Medicine (4UH3AR076729-02). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-25 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10375971. Licensed CC0.

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