SBIR Phase II: Artificial Intelligence Platform Enabling Dermatological Assessments for Clinical Trials, Telehealth, and Personal Care Insights

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will be the implementation of a teledermatology platform with a serviceable obtainable market valued at $2 billion comprising pharmaceutical companies, clinical research organizations, over-the-counter brands, and healthcare practitioners in need of innovative technologies to assess and monitor dermatological conditions and provide more personalized care to patients through science-backed, data-driven tools. The platform will address the rising demand for telemedicine-compatible technologies and offer an advanced yet accessible hair and scalp monitoring tool to the growing number of people with hair and scalp diseases. The platform will also support improvements in the health and welfare of the American public. The proposed project aims to develop an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven mobile health platform that employs machine learning and computer vision algorithms for dermatological assessments using user-provided visual inputs. Overwhelming interest from clinical trial researchers and dermatologists have motivated and steered development goals towards designing an automated platform for hair and scalp health analyses. The proposed Phase II objectives are to: 1) Enhance the platform to support mobile 3D scanning and biomarker mapping, 2) Refine biomarker metadata extraction for precise hair and scalp assessment, and 3) Conduct a comprehensive validation study with dermatology experts. Overall, this work will provide non-invasive, precise, and scalable diagnostic tools to the millions of Americans with hair and scalp conditions. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.