James RimmerThe University of Alabama at Birmingham has been awarded a prestigious P50 grant from the National Institutes of Health, Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. The grant, totaling $6.1 million over five years, will fund the UAB Disability Health Promotion Research Center.
The mission of the DHPRC will be to leverage digital health technologies to empower individuals with physical disabilities to live more independently, manage their health more effectively, and enhance their overall quality of life.
James Rimmer, Ph.D., Lakeshore Foundation Endowed Chair in Health Promotion and Rehabilitation Science, director of the Center for Engagement in Disability Health and Rehabilitation, is the contact principal investigator, with Hui-Ju “Zoe” Young, research scientist, UAB Research Collaborative, and Tapan Mehta, Ph.D., professor and vice chair of Research, Heersink School of Medicine Department of Family and Community Medicine, as MPIs.
The DHPRC will consist of three cores—administrative, resources, and community engagement and outreach—that will attract a transdisciplinary team of UAB researchers from various fields.
Zoe Young“These cores will serve as an integrated support system, bringing together administrative and scholarly leadership with expertise in research design and implementation, participant recruitment, wearable technologies, and community engagement, to establish the infrastructure essential for high-quality, impactful disability and health promotion research,” said Young. “Through this coordinated effort, the three cores, along with the research project led by Mehta, will ensure that studies are designed, implemented, and disseminated rigorously and effectively to advance health promotion and prevent secondary conditions among people with disabilities nationwide.”
“Our work within this new center will be innovative and unique through its use of behavioral economics and AI-enabled tools that will enable precision-based recruitment and adherence recommendations and support future optimization trials for digital health promotion and secondary condition prevention interventions for people with physical disabilities,” said Rimmer.
Rimmer will run the administrative core. Young will manage the resource core. Bertha Hidalgo, Ph.D., associate professor, Epidemiology, School of Public Health, will guide the community engagement and outreach core.
Recruitment, adherence, and retention are critical challenges in medical rehabilitation and health promotion research for people with physical disabilities. These challenges often result in small sample sizes, poor adherence, and high dropout rates, which limit the generalizability of research findings.
Tapan MehtaTo combat this, Mehta is leading an innovative research project titled “Promoting Research Outreach and Mobile Opportunities for Technology-based Engagement in People with Physical Disabilities for Health Promotion (PROMOTE-Health).” This project will focus on the Deep South—particularly Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, which have some of the highest disability rates in the nation—because chronic conditions like diabetes, heart disease and obesity are significantly more prevalent in people with physical disabilities in this region.
“Our research project will focus on optimizing use of existing datasets, developing strategies and tools for people-centered and optimized digital health promotion programs. We will apply AI and behavioral economics-based approaches to develop these tools and strategies to optimize data utilization and improve retention and adherence to health promotion and secondary condition prevention interventions for people with disabilities,” said Mehta. “In turn, our products will be promoted through the resource core to medical rehabilitation and health promotion researchers to facilitate more robust research in health promotion and secondary condition prevention for people with physical disabilities.”
The DHPRC will be housed in the UAB Center for Engagement in Disability Health and Rehabilitation Sciences. CEDHARS is comprised of approximately 125 faculty affiliates from eight different schools and many departments across UAB. It also serves as the umbrella for various research and practice programs, including the prestigious CDC-funded National Center on Health, Physical Activity and Disability (NCHPAD).
