Digital Health for the Opioid Crisis: A Historical Analysis of NIH Funding from 2013 to 2017
Article Sidebar
Main Article Content
ABSTRACT
Prior to the COVID-19 crisis, the opioid crisis was the major public health challenge ravaging economies and communities across the United States. Digital health offered new ways to reach, diagnose, and treat individuals with opioid use disorders. Federal research funding usually reflects the nation’s research priorities and shapes the direction of innovation. We reviewed funded projects by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) from 2013 to 2017, a period leading to the substantial increase in federal funding and the launch of the $500M HEAL (Helping End Addiction Long-TermSM) initiative in 2018. We presented our viewpoint of the research landscape of the digital health development for the opioid crisis. Overall, there was a gradual increase in NIDA grant funding for technology in the opioid crisis and the percentage of NIDA technology awards funding new projects had nearly doubled in that period. We categorize the types of applications and potential challenges in five emerging technology categories: electronic health, mobile health, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and biosensor. Diversification of funding in these categories offers the promise of more innovation in new technologies to combat the opioid epidemic.
Downloads
Metrics
Article Details
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Copyright of individual chapters belongs to the respective authors. The authors grant unrestricted publishing and distribution rights to the publisher. The electronic versions of the chapters are published under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0). Users are allowed to share and adapt the chapters for any non-commercial purposes as long as the authors and the publisher are explicitly identified and properly acknowledged as the original source. The books in their entirety are subject to copyright by the publisher. The reproduction, modification, republication and display of the books in their entirety, in any form, by anyone, for commercial purposes are strictly prohibited without the written consent of the publisher.
