CS News:
A Network for Aging in Place
Given the choice, seniors by far prefer aging in familiar, comfortable surroundings to moving to an assisted living facility — but the drawback has always been safety. Even when surrounded by an attentive network of family, friends and professional caregivers, a fall or similar life-changing event can go undetected for hours, even days.
For Professor Jack Stankovic, the clear-cut solution is a robust cyberphysical system that, when thoughtfully deployed, can have the added advantage of keeping seniors healthier as well as safer. Working with a team of graduate students that includes Robert Dickerson and Enamul Hoque, he developed AlarmNet, a system that uses a variety of sensors — some wearable, some in the living space — to generate real-time data that can be used to analyze the health and well-being of a residence’s inhabitants. “The goal is to use AlarmNet to give physicians a much richer picture of a patient’s health than they could gain during a typical office visit,” says Dickerson. “It could potentially help physicians detect changes in a person’s health early, when interventions can have the best effect.”
Dickerson and Hoque have been working with colleagues around the University to apply variations of AlarmNet in specific circumstances. For instance, they are working with Associate Professor Karen Rose in the School of Nursing on a National Institutes of Health-funded study trying to determine the relationship between incontinence and agitation in Alzheimer’s patients. Patients in the study wear a wrist actigraph at night — a device created by John Lach, a professor of electrical and computer engineering, that measures physical movement and agitation. Their mattresses are equipped with accelerometers, their diapers with wetness sensors, and there are microphones to record verbal agitation. The data will be analyzed to determine whether physical and verbal agitation precedes or follows bed-wetting, creating options for managing the disease more effectively. “We’re developing cyber-physical systems that, when used for research or in real life, can inexpensively produce the knowledge we need to make informed decisions,” Hoque says.
Read more about John Stankovic's research here.