NIH support of mobile, imaging, pervasive sensing, social media and location tracking (MISST) research: laying the foundation to examine research ethics in the digital age

Funding: support for mobile technologies on the rise The number of US government-backed biomedical research projects that involved mobile and digital technologies rose 384% from 2005 to 2015. Camille Nebeker and colleagues from the University of California, San Diego, USA, tabulated how much grant money the US National Institutes of Health was allocating to research projects in which these new kinds of imaging, sensing and tracking tools played an integral role. They found that the agency spent $47 million on 134 relevant projects in 2005;$137 million for 338 projects in 2010; and $293 million for 649 projects in 2015. Although these studies in 2015 represented only about 1% of the agency’s total budget, the authors conclude that the growing popularity of the technologies necessitates giving more consideration to the ethical, legal and social issues associated with their use with human research subjects