Tool or Resource Type: Platform Tools

Mobile Toolbox is a comprehensive study design, execution, and analytics platform designed to support the use of self-administered and fully-remote digital assessments. The system has iOS and Android experiences designed for study participants, and a set of web-based tools for Researchers to design a study, recruit and onboard participants, manage participant adherence to the data collection protocol, and analyze data. This system allows researchers to customize the study app to match their desired study protocol, without any custom software engineering. This system is built on the Bridge Server APIs and SDKs.

Mobile toolbox delivers validated cognitive and other digital assessments that are developed and validated by experts in the field of cognitive research.The system supports a growing portfolio of digital assessments, and is currently launching with smartphone versions of the NIH Toolbox TM cognitive assessments. These assessments have been validated against gold standard measures in healthy adults ages 20-85, and have been normed at 3-month, 12-month and 24-month intervals in a national sample matching the 2020 US Census (N=6,800) for gender, race, ethnicity, SES and level of education. 

Learn More at Mobile Toolbox.

Synapse is a set of web services and tools that make it easier for researchers to aggregate, organize, analyze, and share scientific data, code, and insights. From small private teams to large-scale open-science initiatives, Synapse makes research collaborations more productive. The platform is designed according to the Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable (FAIR) principles, and provides HIPAA-compliant security and data governance tools to ensure data is protected and accessible to scientists while respecting patients’ rights

Sage Bionetworks has over a decade of experience using Synapse to build effective research consortia and collaborations that span organizational boundaries and make biomedical research more open and accessible. We use Synapse to support all of our scientific coordination, challenges, and benchmarking projects. It allows us to organize content, establish transparent and reproducible workflows, track collaborative analysis across distributed teams, and broadcast research assets.

We understand research because we are researchers. Adopt the platform yourself, or contact Sage to bring our expertise to your project.

Read this article about Synapse by our CTO Mike Kellen: From Open Systems to Trusted Systems: New Approaches to Data Commons

Bridge is a platform that supports researchers in conducting remote, sensor-based data collection in clinical research studies with the goal of gathering real-world evidence and lived experience data. Bridge is composed of HIPAA-compliant web services and multi-language SDKs that facilitate:

• enrollment and capture informed consent to participate in research
• design and scheduling of study surveys and interactive sensor-based tasks
• acquisition and secure transfer of multiple data types (including surveys, sensors, audio, video)
• participant management and tools for study coordinators to track study registration and adherence
• the de-identification and storage of study data in our collaborative data science environment, Synapse

Bridge has been in active use since Day 1 of the ResearchKit and ResearchStack frameworks and it facilitates many ongoing and completed research studies.

Researchers wanting assistance with the design or execution of a mobile research study should contact us at info@sagebase.org. Software engineers interested in developing apps using this service should check out our Bridge Developer Portal for documentation, tutorials, and links to code repositories.

Our Challenge Platform is an open-science, collaborative competition framework for evaluating and comparing computational algorithms. We use this platform to establish methodological benchmarks, to determine assessment metrics for developing algorithms, and to promote best-practices in bioinformatics. Using this platform, we administer challenges, serve data, interact with cloud computing servers and provide a collaborative framework for research communities to exchange ideas, data and code. Groups can use this platform to organize challenges and broadcast them to participants. The platform includes a web client where challenge organizers can register participants, broadcast a detailed challenge description, distribute data, collect submissions, post results and communicate with participants through forums and list-serves.

The platform can support challenges where participants are asked to submit algorithms in place of solutions. In these cases, the platform runs the algorithms on the data and returns results to participants. This allows organizers to perform evaluations using data that cannot be made openly available to challenge participants due to legal or ethical restrictions. This infrastructure permits researchers outside of the challenge to access and run their pipelines for their own research purposes, thereby facilitating a clearinghouse for tools and methods.

Our Challenge Platform is used to power DREAM Challenges, which are focused exclusively on biomedicine with a strong emphasis on cancer, and has an explicit mandate for transparency, openness, and collaboration. These principles enable DREAM to focus on the overarching goal of providing a community resource for the evaluation of emerging methodologies based on practical applications. For more information – and an extended list of current and past DREAM challenges – please visit dreamchallenges.org. In addition, we have helped to launch several independent Challenges using our platform.

To explore opportunities for partnering with Sage experts and using this platform to address scientific questions and foster open and collaborative science, please contact info@sagebase.org.