BioMedware announces the award of a contract from the National Cancer Institute titled “METRIC Software to Measure Cancer Health Environment“. This is an SBIR Phase 1 contract with a 9 month performance period beginning September 12, 2014. The Principal Investigator for the project is BioMedware’s Chief Scientist, Pierre Goovaerts, supported by Andy Kaufmann and Robert Rommel as software engineers.
The goal of this project is to develop the first software specifically designed for the access, creation and visualization of environmental measures related to cancer health behavior and resources, providing: 1) a user-friendly interface for locating, accessing and importing data into the existing Geographical Information System, 2) automated homogenization of data layers to a common geography, 3) flexible construction of metrics to characterize the food, physical activity and health care access environments, 4) visualization, exploratory data analysis and ranking of the results to identify geographical disparities, and 5) efficient export of results into an Esri shapefile format, Excel workbooks and XML. Software architecture for the prototype will be built to extend and customize BioMedware’s SpaceStat platform. Software design will focus on providing a user-centered design to accomplish the workflow tasks described above.