A clinician-in-the-loop smart home to support health monitoring and intervention for chronic conditions: Supplement to focus on Alzheimer's and/or other dementias

NIH RePORTER · NIH · R01 · $366,710 · view on reporter.nih.gov ↗

Abstract

PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT The world's population is aging and the increasing number of older adults with Alzheimer's disease and related dementias (ADRDs) is a challenge our society must address. While the idea of smart environments is now a reality, there remain gaps in our knowledge about how to scale smart homes technologies for use in complex settings and to use machine learning and activity learning technologies to design automated health assessment and intervention strategies. The primary objective of the parent study is to design a “clinician in the loop” smart home to empower individuals in managing their chronic health conditions by automating health monitoring, assessment, and evaluation of intervention impact. This supplement extends our design to monitor, assess, and intervene for individuals with ADRDs and their caregivers. Building on our prior work, the approach will be to generate analytics describing an individual's behavior routine using smart homes, smartwatches, and activity learning (Aim 1). Our trained clinicians will use the analytics to train algorithms for health assessment (Aim 2). In addition, we will introduce brain health interventions to extend brain health and objectively capture intervention both adherence and caregiver support (Aim 3). Clinician guidance is used to train machine learning algorithms to automatically recognize health events (Aim 4). Given the unique challenges that will arise when we include individuals with ADRDs, we also introduce novel methods to track multiple residents in smart environments (Aim 5) and compare behaviors between individuals with ADRDs and the original sample of older adults with chronic health conditions (Aim 6). These contributions are significant because they can extend the health self-management of our aging society through proactive health care and real-time intervention, and reduce the emotional and financial burden for caregivers and society. Given nursing home care costs, the impact of family-based care, and the importance that people place on staying at home, technologies that increase functional independence and thus support aging in place while improving quality of life for both individuals and their caregivers are of significant value to both individuals and society.

Key facts

NIH application ID
10086759
Project number
3R01NR016732-04S1
Recipient
WASHINGTON STATE UNIVERSITY
Principal Investigator
Diane Joyce Cook
Activity code
R01
Funding institute
NIH
Fiscal year
2020
Award amount
$366,710
Award type
3
Project period
2017-08-01 → 2022-05-31