The Utah PRISMS Informatics Ecosystem: An Infrastructure for Generating and Utilizing Exposomes for Translational Research

Quantifying effects of the modern environment on health requires taking into account data from all contributing environmental exposures (exposome) which can span endogenous processes within the body, biological responses of adaptation to environment, and socio-behavioral factors. Exposomic research is translational in nature as the exposome includes direct biological pathway alterations as well as mutagenic and epigenetic mechanisms of environmental influences on the phenome. Generating exposomes requires integration of data from wearable and stationary sensors, environmental monitors, physiology, medication use and other clinical data, genomic and other biospecimen-derived, person-reported and computational models. This aggregation and integration requires to support variable spatio-temporal resolutions due to differences in study, experimental and analytical designs. Gaps in measured data may need to be filled with modeled data along with characterization of uncertainties. We are developing a scalable computation infrastructure, the Utah PRISMS (Pediatric Research Using Integrated Sensor Monitoring Systems) Informatics Ecosystem (UPIE) to address these needs. UPIE is a comprehensive, standards-based, open-source informatics platform that provides semantically consistent, metadata-driven, event-based management of exposomic data. Using an event-driven architecture always the modeling and storage of all activities related to the study itself and its operations in their primitive form on a timeline as events that can be transformed to higher/analytical models based on use-cases. It is aligned with the goals of modern environmental health research supporting meaningful integration of sensor and biomedical data. It consists of the following components: 1. Data acquisition pipeline: Hardware and software tools, wireless networking, and protocols to support easy system deployment, robust sensor data collection, and feedback to study participants. 2. Participant facing tools: Collect and annotate various patient ...