$5.1M Awarded to the TemPredict Study Directed by Ashley Mason, PhD 

UCSF Osher Center faculty member Ashley Mason, PhD, has received a $5.1M award to expand TemPredict, a study she directs in collaboration with Rick Hecht, MD, and Benjamin Smarr, PhD. This award is from the Medical Technology Enterprise Consortium in partnership with the Department of Defense. TemPredict aims to develop an algorithm to predict the onset of COVID-19 symptoms based on data collected by the Oura wearable smartring that could be applied to data from other wearable devices. TemPredict has enrolled 45,000 participants including 3,400 healthcare workers at university hospitals across the country. 

Previously, TemPredict received funding from Oura Ring, #startsmall, and more recently, an $800K contract from the Department of Defense to collect dried blood samples to conduct antibody testing to match participants’ symptom data with their smartring and antibody testing results. The larger $5.1M award will pay for the completion of antibody testing for 10,000 participants and will also provide support for algorithm development and pilot testing. The pilot testing will allow participants who opt in to receive directives to get tested for COVID-19 based on algorithms using their smartring data. This part of the study will allow the researchers to iteratively test and improve the algorithm and evaluate how it works in the real world. This effort includes researchers at UCSF and UC San Diego as well as researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Lincoln Laboratory, the US Army, and the US Navy.