The Copenhagen Research Platform (CARP) has been awarded DKK 8 million from the Novo Nordisk Foundation‘s Large Equipment and Facilities program. The five-year grant starts in January 2027 and will turn CARP into an open national research infrastructure for digital phenotyping. CARP will be hosted at DTU Health Tech and the national Computerome infrastructure.
What the Grant Enables
The grant moves CARP from a research project to a professionally operated, shared facility. It funds work in six areas:
- Scalability – a cloud-native backbone that can run many studies in parallel and support cohorts at national scale, up to the entire Danish adult population.
- Integration – standardized interfaces to wearables (e.g., Fitbit, Garmin, Withings, Dexcom), Danish public infrastructure (MitID, e-Boks), and clinical research platforms (e.g., REDCap, Sundhedsplatformen).
- Recruitment and User Management – eConsent, onboarding, and retention tools for large-scale participant enrollment.
- Availability – a dedicated team for maintenance, support, and training. Developers get documented open-source components, and clinical researchers get a software-as-a-service platform.
- Data Management – long-term data management aligned with the FAIR principles.
- Compliance – strengthened security and auditability for regulatory-grade research, enabling DTU to act as a GDPR-compliant data manager on behalf of the study’s data controller.
Who Benefits
CARP will be openly accessible to academic, clinical, and industrial users:
- Digital phenotyping researchers can define study protocols and deploy them through the CARP Studies app, without developing their own software.
- Clinical and real-world evidence researchers, including hospitals, CROs, and life science companies, can collect physiological, behavioral, contextual, patient-reported, and cognitive data over long study periods.
- mHealth developers, from students to start-ups and established companies, can build applications on CARP’s open-source components, released under the MIT license.
- Health data scientists gain access to multimodal data for identifying digital biomarkers.
The infrastructure is supported by core users across psychiatry, occupational medicine, diabetes, neurology, and mobility research:
- NEAD Centre, Mental Health Centre Copenhagen
- Department of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, Aarhus University Hospital
- Steno Diabetes Center Copenhagen
- Department of Neurology, Zealand University Hospital
- Transport Division, DTU Management
Thank You
We thank the Novo Nordisk Foundation for its support, and our users and partners for their commitment to CARP. Read more about the platform at carp.dk.