How can AI help the growing number of Alzheimer’s patients who would like to remain in their homes as they age?
That’s one big question a new collaborative spearheaded by the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Brigham and Women’s Hospital aims to take on in the recently announced Massachusetts AI and Technology Center for Connecter Care in Aging and Alzheimer’s Disease (MassAITC).
Funded through a National Institute on Aging (NIA) grant for roughly $20 million over five years, the collaborative will also include Massachusetts General Hospital, Brandeis University, and Northeastern University, and it will focus on improving in-home care for older adults and individuals with Alzheimer’s disease.
The center will be based at UMass Amherst and have access to extensive expertise, patient cohorts and other resources from its partner institutions around Massachusetts.
“We are pleased that UMass Amherst will house this new center, which brings together such distinguished institutions from across the Commonwealth,” UMass Amherst Chancellor Kumble R. Subbaswamy said in a statement.
“The Center will leverage the campus’s considerable expertise in AI and life sciences to develop advanced care for Alzheimer’s patients and address healthcare disparities associated with the disease. Applying groundbreaking research and innovation to real-world problems is central to the mission of the flagship campus.”
The center will be co-led by Deepak Ganesan, professor in UMass Amherst’s Robert and Donna Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS), and Niteesh Choudhry, director of the Center for Healthcare Delivery Sciences in the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School.
According to Paul Anderson, senior vice president of research and education at Brigham and Women’s, there is a critical need to bring the capabilities of AI to those who need it most.
“This grant will allow experts from across our state to come together to help address this key gap,” Anderson said.
Research shows that more than 90 percent of older Americans would prefer to stay in their homes as they age, but chronic diseases such as Alzheimer’s make it difficult for older populations to remain at home without substantial support. At-home healthcare technologies can help, but they are not explicitly developed for older adults or Alzheimer’s patients, caregivers, and clinicians. Moreover, treatment and intervention strategies are currently limited when it comes to being delivered remotely and adapted to the patient’s needs.
MassAITC seeks to address such healthcare disparities via AI research and development, and it hopes to close gaps in interdisciplinary research by gathering data on the perspectives of patients, caregivers, clinicians, behavioral scientists, and other stakeholders. These perspectives will then be used to enhance AI and machine learning development.
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