# Digital search engine platform to improve education and access to affordable housing options and resources for recovering substance abuse patients at risk of homelessness.

> **NIH NIH R43** · KNOWLEDGE TO OWN, INC. · 2020 · $184,575

## Abstract

Abstract
Patients recovering from substance-use disorders have a greater chance for successful recovery, avoiding
relapse, and integrating back into society through secure housing. Research studies have proven that the
quality of housing directly impacts the likelihood for recovery. Although housing programs, grants, and other
types of assistance are available for patients to search for viable housing options, these current marketplace
solutions do not really provide any clear guidance to navigate the complicated and demanding home buying
process. Furthermore, there is a lack of educational resources for consumers who often think they need to put
more money down to purchase a home than is actually required. These challenges have created a large gap in
consumer education and resources, which makes it difficult to identify and pre-screen buyers for suitable home
buying programs, especially for recovering substance-use patients. Consequently, thousands of potential
homeowners “walk away” from buying a home because of lack of information and inability to find a suitable
program. Unfortunately, these housing challenges are also relevant to the general homebuyer population
across the US, especially for low-income earners. KTO's goal is to address the significant need for better
housing programs, sheltering options, resources, and search platforms specifically for recovering substance-
use patients to support their journey towards sobriety. KTO is developing a digital platform designed to deliver
customized information to help homebuyers identify and utilize financial resources to lower home buying costs.
Our platform will address the significant gap in consumer education and traditional lender's lack of legal
obligation to provide information on suitable products to homebuyers in a straightforward, easily accessible,
and affordable manner. We suspect the KTO web app will save homebuyers time (search) and money (grants
and other assistance) by simplifying the process of matching buyers to resources when buying a new home.
Herein this proposal, our goal is to tailor our current KTO web app platform prototype and to gather customer
feedback to validate our minimum viable prototype (MVP) to meet the needs of recovering patients from
substance abuse. The Phase I aims are: AIM 1: (a) Identify relevant homebuyer assistance programs in the
Northeast United States by conducting short survey interviews to understand variables to consider to
accommodate home-buyers recovering from substance abuse; and, (b) Translate and optimize our manual
survey towards an automatized web form for recovering substance abuse patients; and, AIM 2: Recruit and
identify 50 recovering patients interested in home buying options to conduct a small pilot study on our MVP to
take our survey and participate in a focus group to gather feedback on the KTO web app performance and
efficiency. These steps would be critical for our long-term goals to pursue a Phase II SBIR along with customer
a...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 9984142
- **Project number:** 1R43DA051041-01
- **Recipient organization:** KNOWLEDGE TO OWN, INC.
- **Principal Investigator:** Alberto Estrella
- **Activity code:** R43 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2020
- **Award amount:** $184,575
- **Award type:** 1
- **Project period:** 2020-08-01 → 2022-02-28

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/9984142

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 9984142, Digital search engine platform to improve education and access to affordable housing options and resources for recovering substance abuse patients at risk of homelessness. (1R43DA051041-01). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-29 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/9984142. Licensed CC0.

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