Refinement of a novel at-home kit for contact dermatitis testing and diagnosis.

About This Grant

ABSTRACT Contact dermatitis affects up to 50% of the U.S. population. Contact dermatitis has significant health repercussions and economic burden, accounting for more than 90% of occupational skin disorders, impacting workplace productivity with an estimated annual cost of $1 billion, including $268 million due to lost workdays and $141 million due to restricted activity days. Allergic contact dermatitis also significantly impacts quality of life, as measured by DLQI and Skindex-16 indices. Unfortunately, diagnostic testing for contact dermatitis is a complex, time-intensive process that is inaccessible to many patients in need. The current gold standard is patch testing. This testing must be performed by a dermatologist at a specialty clinic, which causes a barrier for patients in rural locations. Additionally, wait times for visits often stretch across many months leaving patients with no immediate answers to their symptoms. Patch testing also requires three clinic visits spread over five days. The time commitment is burdensome even when patients live in close proximity to the clinic. For those that have to travel, testing can result in high expenses for travel and hotels in addition to time missed at work. Finally, patch testing is a resource-heavy task for providers and forces them to spend time that could otherwise be spent seeing more patients. Alleviate’s solution is a novel testing platform that combines 1) a skin patch kit, 2) a patient and provider mobile application, and 3) a cloud infrastructure. This novel telediagnostic approach will streamline patch testing, gathering critical patient-provided data further optimizing patch testing through data science approaches. This clinically-developed and tested workflow positions Alleviate with a first-of-its-kind, at-home, AI-powered patch test, overcoming key limitations of the current approach. Alleviate has successfully established the foundational assets to democratize skin patch te sting. In the proposed Phase I effort, these assets will be refined through additional development and verification in order to prepare the platform for commercialization.