Researchers from Oregon Health & Science University are helping seniors stay in their homes longer. Sumathi Reddy in The Wall Street Journal describes the researchers installing eight sensors in the studio apartment of a 75-year-old Portland, OR, resident. The sensors will monitor his movements, including walking speed. Other sensors will monitor his computer use—changes could signal cognitive decline—and the medications he takes.
Reddy quotes Jeffrey Kaye, director of the Oregon Center for Aging and Technology, part of OHSU, and lead researcher on the study, as saying, “The technologies that we install are designed to detect changes that are basic to people’s daily function and their ability to stay independent.”
She quotes Zach Beattie, director of data acquisition and analytics at OHSU, as saying, “The hope is to be able to find early digital biomarkers of problems much earlier than they’d be found in the clinic.”
Privacy is of course a concern, but no cameras are involved, and the computer monitoring doesn’t track specific URLs, for example.
The work is part of a national study called CART—for Collaborative Aging in place Research using Technology. The goal is “…to develop and validate the infrastructure for rapid and effective conduct of future research utilizing technology to facilitate aging in place, with a special emphasis on people from underrepresented groups,” according to the National Institutes of Health, which operates the program with the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Reddy concludes by saying the researchers hope to obtain more funding and scale the project to thousands of homes.
In a separate article, Reddy describes how the monitoring of computer users can help diagnose diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. “A Duke University doctor working with Microsoft researchers sifted through data on the physical movements of computer users that came from millions of internet searches,” she writes. “Their study found links between some behaviors—such as tremors when using a mouse, repeat queries and average scrolling velocity—and Parkinson’s disease.”
