Massachusetts Lieutenant Governor Karyn Polito, on last Thursday, joined the executives from GE for announcement of a $5 million grant from the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative towards construction of a new digital health innovation lab at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). The grant will be matched by nearly $9.5 million from the WPI, as well as $2.5 million in support from the GE Healthcare Life Sciences in both capital investments and also imaging equipment.

These funds will go toward the new integrated research and development labs, called PracticePoint at the WPI, that will focus on the commercialization of secure healthcare devices and systems. The PracticePoint at WPI will focus on development of cyber-physical healthcare systems and products. These systems and products could include any device which intelligently interacts with people or things, such as the robotic diagnostic tools, image-guided surgical robots, sensor-enabled and also personalized therapeutics, smart rehabilitation devices, smart orthoses and prosthetics, or the home healthcare proxy devices.

These smart and secure devices can help to improve surgical procedures, rehabilitative care, and also independent living, while ultimately enabling the highly personalized precision therapies, procedures, and diagnostics to deliver the truly personalized care.

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The center will feature four settings, and they are surgical, clinical, rehabilitative, and also home healthcare in a single research and development facility, helping to accelerate product development cycles by providing rapid point-of-practice testing that will co-locate healthcare practitioners and also the technical teams.

Multidisciplinary academic and industry teams will conduct the pre-competitive research at PracticePoint to advance the entire field. The center will offer a wide range of educational and training opportunities for workforce development to support the growing digital health industry in Massachusetts, that already boasts over 350 companies. The facility will also integrate secure data analytics and also equipment to test technologies for cybersecurity vulnerabilities.

This marks as the sixth award made by the Innovation Institute at the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative under the Commonwealth’s Collaborative Research and Development Matching Grant program, which makes high-impact on capital grant awards in the promising areas of technology innovation. The Collaborative Research and Development Matching Grant program was established in the year 2012, with $50 million in the capital authorization, to spur the additional research and development activity in Commonwealth’s regions.

Mrudula Duddempudi.