Project Grant R01HL183262

The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute awarded The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia $1,068,774 on August 11, 2026, under the Cardiovascular Diseases Research program (CFDA 93.837) to develop a cloud-based platform for measuring physical activity via wearable sensors and predicting clinical worsening in pediatric pulmonary hypertension.

The project addresses a critical gap in pediatric pulmonary hypertension treatment: pediatric mortality remains near 30% over five years, yet only two medications are approved for children compared to twelve for adults. Standard adult clinical trial endpoints such as the six-minute walk distance cannot be administered to most children due to age or developmental status, blocking the design of pediatric medication trials. The recipient will deploy open-source computational tools (GGIR for raw accelerometer analysis and MIMS for movement summary) within a cloud-based, modular platform to standardize physical activity data processing across wearable sensor devices, wear locations, and age groups. The platform will assign age and sex-specific physical activity percentile rankings derived from nationally representative National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey data and will develop machine learning models to detect physical activity patterns indicating disease progression. This work overcomes limitations of prior pediatric studies constrained by proprietary sensor software, black-box algorithms, and narrow reference populations that limited generalizability across devices and age groups.

Performance occurs in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The award period runs through May 31, 2031.