July 11, 2023
Initiative jointly funds two Innovation Gap Fund projects with CoMotion
The University of Washington Population Health Initiative continued its annual partnership with CoMotion to jointly fund two Innovation Gap Funds of $50,000 each. This $100,000 in funding will support projects that simultaneously support the UW’s vision for improving population health while also fulfilling the CoMotion Innovation Fund’s goal of enabling research that will achieve sustainable commercial or social impact.
The first funded project is DEFIB AI: Defibrillator Algorithms for Patient-Specific Cardiac Arrest Treatment. The project is led by Jason Coult and Thomas Rea of the Department of Internal Medicine and seeks to equip defibrillators with precision medicine functionality that dynamically aligns the choice and timing of cardiac arrest treatment with a patient’s specific physiology. Such an approach would be a shift from the current one-size-fits-all schedule for resuscitation treatments, potentially saving as many as 40,000 lives a year in the United States.
The second funded project is SocioLx Solutions, which is led by Alicia Wassink of the Department of Linguistics. The project seeks to reduce or eliminate three different kinds of bias that make automatic speech recognition less accurate for certain racial and ethnic groups. SocioLx Solutions will work to acquire user experience data to identify pain points that minoritized people face when they use voice assistants, build dialect-rich datasets formatted for system development and creating novel software for pronunciation modeling.