Improving the Lives of Older Adults Through AI

According to the United States Census, the population of adults over age 65 has spiked in the past decade, reaching more than 55 million people—or over 1 in 6 people in the country—in 2020. The vast majority of older Americans would prefer to stay in their homes as they age, but for many, chronic illness, including Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and related dementias, make this out of reach without substantial support.  

The experts at the Massachusetts AI and Technology Center for Connected Care in Aging and Alzheimer’s Disease (MassAITC) see an opportunity to address this challenge through advanced artificial intelligence (AI) research and development, done in partnership with stakeholders such as patients, caregivers, clinicians, and industry (especially small companies and startups in the AgeTech space).

About MassAITC:

• Launched in November 2021 with a $20 million grant from the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) National Institute on Aging (NIA), it is one of three AITC centers in the country, organized under the umbrella a2 Collective.
• Headquartered at UMass Amherst, it is a collaboration between UMass Amherst, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Massachusetts General Hospital, Brandeis University, and Northeastern University.
• It is co-led by Deepak Ganesan and Ben Marlin, faculty in UMass Amherst’s Manning College of Information & Computer Sciences, and Niteesh Choudhry at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School.
• MassAITC works in close partnership with the UMass Amherst Institute for Applied Life Sciences (IALS).

A Tech Accelerator to Serve End Users

The center’s primary role is as a technology accelerator, providing funding and support for research teams to study feasibility and provide initial validation of technologies with potential to significantly impact healthy aging or improve quality of life for older adults, with a special emphasis on Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias.

“In addition to funding, we support pilots in a variety of ways. We facilitate interdisciplinary collaborations between experts and companies across different domains, and provide access to state-of-the-art facilities to allow them to collect high-quality data sets,” said Ganesan. “We also offer technical guidance to support real-world, at-home studies involving wearable and passive sensors, including machine learning applied to sensor data.”

To date, MassAITC has funded two rounds of pilot projects and is in the process of reviewing applications for a third round. Pilot teams are studying a range of different topics of importance for the target population, in areas including:

•     Fall risk and general physical functioning
•     Sleep and circadian rhythms
•     Prediction of cognitive decline
•     Improving dementia care
•     Cardiovascular health

“The pilot teams are approaching these important challenges from different angles,” explained David Paquette, MassAITC associate research director. “As part of their research, they are considering usability, privacy concerns, and other measures of acceptability to ensure the technologies developed will actually be useful to patients, their caregivers, and clinicians.”

To that end, MassAITC hosts a Stakeholder Engagement Core, which connects researchers with the people who may ultimately benefit from new technologies to help shape products in development.

“It’s important to understand early on, 'Is this technology acceptable?’ Because at the end of the day, if it’s too burdensome for patients and caregivers, they won’t use it,” said Michael Busa, director of the UMass Amherst Center for Human Health and Performance (CH2P) and a collaborator on a MassAITC-sponsored pilot project.

MassAITC also serves as a matchmaker, helping to connect clinicians, academics, and start-ups with complementary interests in powerful collaborations.

“I think there’s a lot of value in bringing together academics and people in industry in one space to push innovation forward,” said UMass Amherst alumna Jen Blankenship, senior research scientist at VivoSense, Inc., and a collaborator on the pilot with Busa. “Oftentimes, those of us in industry have the interest and entrepreneurial ideas to make moves happen and advance technologies but lack the scientific resources and facilities that UMass offers. Bringing together these two entities to move the needle is very powerful.”

This story was originally published in October 2023.