A collection of tools is of little value unless all users can access it seamlessly in workflows. This is especially true in the rapidly evolving biomedical research sector with its vast array of new data and groundbreaking technologies. Charles River Analytics is working with the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), an agency within the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), to make it easier to connect biomedical research data from thousands of sources and overcome barriers caused by incompatible data dialects to deliver better health outcomes. With an up to $3.2 million, two-year award, Charles River is developing ENHANCE to foster user-centered development of ARPA-H’s Biomedical Data Fabric (BDF) Toolbox.
ARPA-H performers are developing the toolbox to consolidate biomedical data from a variety of health disciplines and resolve inconsistencies in how research data is currently stored and shared. The BDF Toolbox promises to make data readily available to researchers seeking to advance the development of next-generation treatments and cures.
The toolset also needs to facilitate access to all authorized users, including clinicians and patients, and therefore needs to accommodate multiple levels of biomedical literacy. Charles River Analytics is helping with this aspect of the project. “We’re conducting user-centered testing to strengthen the BDF Toolbox, recruiting representative users across user types, biomedical and technical literacy levels, and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) considerations,” says Dr. Nicolette McGeorge, Principal Investigator on ENHANCE and Senior Scientist at Charles River. “Ultimately, the goal for ENHANCE is to make sure that the tools being created as part of the BDF program are actually the tools that need to be created and have all the necessary functionality for the user,” she adds.
The first aspect of ENHANCE involves identifying the users and understanding their workflows and relevant sub use cases. Once the team members identify the users and their workflows, they can evaluate elements of the planned toolbox using principles of human factors engineering and cognitive systems engineering. “We’re going to be assessing the tools with principles of good usability practice. The goal is to support an iterative design and refinement process so the toolbox elements can be improved early on,” McGeorge says. “We assess all the different complex elements so that we can ensure positive outcomes for patients.”
The BDF Toolbox will also incorporate artificial intelligence (AI) into its framework, which means the ENHANCE team’s evaluation of the tool structure will also assess the effectiveness of human-AI teaming elements. “Part of the challenge when incorporating AI is to understand its limitations. Tools must be designed such that humans can recognize when tools have reached the bounds of AI’s capabilities. And that’s just one facet of designing these tools to support an effective human-AI team,” McGeorge says. ENHANCE will also support verification and validation of software and ensure that the tools in the BDF Toolbox follow robust software engineering practices.
McGeorge is excited that ARPA-H has valued a user-centered focus, and it’s why ENHANCE is such a value-add to the BDF Toolbox project. “We’re calling the project ENHANCE because it goes beyond the basic usability evaluation with enhanced approaches to iterative design and evaluation of tools at the intersection of humans and AI in complex environments,” she explains. It’s not just about having buttons in the right places, McGeorge cautions. “Users need clear, relevant information exactly when they need it, presented in a way that makes it easy to understand and helps them make decisions effectively. That context is critical,” McGeorge says.
Contact us to learn more about ENHANCE and our other capabilities in user interfaces and human-machine teaming, and health and medical tools.
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NIH-National Cancer Institute (NCI): Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) Biomedical Data Fabric (BDF) Toolbox
NCI Cancer Research Data Commons (CRDC): Partners with ARPA-H on the Biomedical Data Fabric Toolbox Program
This research was funded in part by the U.S. government. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the author(s) and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the U.S. government.
