Decentralizing health research using AWS with UCalgary’s ResearchAlly

Traditional health research often requires participants to travel for scheduled study visits. For many, especially those in rural communities or facing mobility challenges, this creates significant participation barriers. Researchers are also limited to collecting data during scheduled appointments, providing an incomplete picture of real-world health between visits.

While conducting spinal cord injury research, the University of Calgary team encountered those challenges firsthand. People living with spinal cord injuries were eager to participate in studies but faced obstacles including specialized transportation, overnight stays, and travel costs. “That was a big moment where we realized that this needed to change,” says Dr. Aaron Phillips, project coleader at ResearchAlly. “Not being able to include them in our research would limit the generalizability of our data to the whole community of people living with spinal cord injury.”

Working with patients, clinicians, and researchers, the team envisioned bringing research to participants through mobile technologies. So the university launched the ResearchAlly initiative and used AWS to develop a secure, scalable foundation to support sensitive health data that meets institutional governance and compliance requirements.

ResearchAlly runs on AWS to support mobile health research. Rather than developing a separate application for every study, the team created a common cloud architecture with shared security, governance, and core functionality to support multiple research initiatives.

To rapidly develop cross-platform mobile applications, the team used AWS Amplify, which helps developers build web and mobile applications. Using AWS Amplify, the team provisions and redeploys application infrastructure across multiple research environments, helping accelerate development.

ResearchAlly stores participant and study information using Amazon DynamoDB, a serverless, fully managed, distributed NoSQL database. To support backend processing for continuous health data, the initiative also uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which offers secure and resizable compute capacity for any workload.

To protect sensitive health data, ResearchAlly uses Amazon Cognito, a service that implements scalable access control, to securely authenticate researchers and participants. It adds additional security using AWS Identity and Access Management (AWS IAM)—which securely manages identities and access to AWS services and resources—and AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS), which makes it easy to create and manage cryptographic keys.

Working alongside AWS Professional Services, ResearchAlly conducted security reviews, penetration testing, and architecture reviews to meet institutional governance requirements while giving researchers and ethics boards confidence in the initiative. “The breadth of available AWS services is hugely valuable in moving quickly and effectively, as was the expert AWS Professional Services consultation on which products would help us get there,” says Dr. Kelly Larkin-Kaiser, project coleader at ResearchAlly.

The shared architecture has made it possible for the team to rapidly launch new research initiatives without rebuilding its underlying infrastructure. One example is SpineAlly, a version of ResearchAlly developed for spinal cord injury research that uses the secure cloud architecture for participants to contribute health data remotely.

ResearchAlly has transformed how researchers conduct health studies. SpineAlly alone has more than 1,000 participants across all 50 US states and all 10 Canadian provinces, contributing more than 125 million health data points in months rather than years. Such results would have been nearly impossible to achieve using traditional research methods. The expanded participation and richer health data help researchers generate more complete, real-world datasets that strengthen clinical research and future discoveries.

Ethics and compliance approvals have helped establish ResearchAlly as a trusted foundation for additional research initiatives. “The fact that we’ve been able to acquire ethics and compliance approvals across a number of institutions in Canada, the United States, and now the United Kingdom just speaks to how robust our security architecture is,” says Phillips.

The team plans to expand ResearchAlly internationally. “Our goal is to make ResearchAlly more accessible to researchers across the globe and use multimodal data to advance research studies and improve health outcomes sooner,” says Larkin-Kaiser.