By DoM Communications | Date published: July 27, 2026
Roberto Caricchio and Apurv Soni Develop Remove Patient Monitoring System to Improve Care for People with Lupus
Roberto Caricchio, MD, the Myles J. McDonough Chair in Rheumatology, professor of medicine, chief of the Division of Rheumatology, and director of the Lupus Center at UMass Chan, and Apurv Soni, MD, PhD’21, assistant professor of medicine and director of the Program in Digital Medicine, are developing a remote patient monitoring system that uses wearable technology and a smartphone app to provide physicians with more data to inform the care of patients with lupus.
The PILLAR Project (Patient-centered interventions for lupus monitoring using learning-based adaptive recognition), co-led by Dr. Soni, is a three-year project that includes a randomized clinical trial to test engagement strategies and aims to enroll 50 or more patients for a remote monitoring program. The program will be implemented in collaboration with the Digital Health Clinic at UMass Memorial Health, led by John Broach, MD, associate professor of medicine and division chief of Emergency Medical Services in the Department of Emergency Medicine. According to Drs. Caricchio and Soni, the goal of the project is to gain a better understanding of the health status of people living with lupus.
“We’ll launch the remote patient monitoring program using established biomarkers. Separately, we will run a clinical study that acts as an experimental lab to test new sensors and data collection methods,” explained Dr. Soni. “We’re going to try and determine if there are ways to detect lupus flares more accurately and predict them by studying physiological changes in the body that precede symptoms.”