Gregory Knapik, PhD is Associate Director of the Spine Research Institute and Research Professor in Integrated Systems Engineering. He applied for a Spark Award to support his project “The Spine Phenome Project: Enabling Technology for Personalized Medicine.”
“The overall goal of our project is to develop technology that helps clinicians identify and manage back pain more accurately,” says Knapik. “We are building a digital health platform that uses wearable sensors and computational modeling to analyze spine motion and provide objective evidence about the underlying causes of a patient’s symptoms.”
Supported by funding from BACPAC, part of the NIH HEAL initiative, the Spine Phenome project collects data from spine patients at baseline and follow-up stages post-treatment, as well as healthy controls. The platform combines sensor-enabled functional assessments with patient-reported outcomes to capture key aspects of the biopsychosocial model of chronic pain. These metrics aim to identify unique patient phenotypes and enable personalized treatment strategies through machine learning algorithms.
The Spark Award will provide essential recruitment support through MyChart Honest Broker services to enroll healthy control participants. “This support ensures adequate sample size, strengthens study rigor and allows us to generate high-quality data needed to validate our spine-motion technology,” explains Knapik. “Ultimately, this work will advance pain-phenotyping research and improve clinical decision-making for spine disorders.”
Congratulations to Gregory on receiving a Spark Award and using it to accelerate innovation in spine health.
Julie Johnson, PharmD, is the Director and Principal Investigator at The Ohio State University Clinical and Translational Science Institute.