About the SMARTER project

Scientists use real-world data, including sensor measurements (air quality sensors, chemical sensors, biological sensors) to study environmental exposures and their health effects. However, we lack robust informatics tools that enable researchers to share, find, assess, and re-use environmental data sources. The central problem is a lack of metadata that enables appropriate use and re-use of sensor data and other types of exposure health research data.  Metadata is data that describes the properties of the data and the methods and processes for their acquisition, collection, or generation.

The SMARTER project at University of Utah is working to advance metadata methods for exposure health research, with a special focus on sensor metadata. In prior work, we developed the Exposure Health Informatics Ecosystem (EHIE), a comprehensive, standards-based, open-source informatics platform that provides semantically consistent, metadata-driven, event-based management, and simulation and modeling of exposure data. The SMARTER project will enhance EHIE with a graph metadata repository, user-facing tools and other features and artifacts that enable exposure health research data use and re-use, by rendering the data FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Re-usable).

We are committed to developing systems and tools that meet the needs of the environmental and exposure health research community. Please join our mailing list for periodic updates (beginning in 2025).

The University of Utah SMARTER Project is funded by the National Institutes of Health, National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences (“Community-Driven Sensor Metadata Ecosystem for Exposure Health“, 1R24ES036134-01, Multi-Principal Investigators Ramkiran Gouripeddi & Mollie R. Cummins). The content of this web site is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.