wearable device

Innovate for Good: Multidisciplinary Research Explores Wearable and Music Technologies to Support Cognitive Impairment

Mary Cunningham — Fri, 22 Jul 2022 18:27:17 +0000

Innovate for Good: Multidisciplinary Research Explores Wearable and Music Technologies to Support Cognitive Impairment Mary Cunningham Fri, 07/22/2022 - 14:27

In This Story

Emily Ihara, PhD, MSW, FGSA

Megumi Inoue, PhD

Mason’s Institute for Digital InnovAtion (IDIA) aims to connect Mason’s world class research community with other communities to engage in cutting edge work to shape the future of our digital society, promoting equality, wellbeing, security and prosperity.

Several Department of Social Work faculty were awarded 2021 IDIA seed grants, which are for projects that focus on what’s known as disruptive digital innovation, aimed at helping organizations reduce costs, improve services, or bring about a paradigm shift.

The next part of our Innovate for Good series explores how College of Health and Human Services faculty are expanding research on dementia and palliative care.

Improving Dementia Care with Wearable Technologies

Emily S. Ihara, chair of the Department of Social Work

Building off a successful research project called the Music and Memory initiative, a multidisciplinary team of Mason faculty members is collecting physiological data points to determine what happens to the body when those with dementia hear certain types of music.

Known as “Smart Music Intervention Program for Older Adults with Cognitive Impairment: A Protocol Development,” the project will develop a wearable technology device to measure things like heart rate and skin temperature in dementia patients.

The team is comprised of Emily S. Ihara, chair of the Department of Social Work; Megumi Inoue, associate professor in the Department of Social Work; Cathy Tompkins, professor in the Department of Social Work; Y. Alicia Hong in the Department of Health Policy and Administration; plus Parth Pathak and Huzefa Rangwala in the Department of Computer Science.

“The goal of this project is to develop an easily accessible, automatic, personalized digital music intervention program for older adults living with cognitive impairment,” said Ihara. “We already know that personalized music has been shown to decrease negative psychological and behavioral symptoms for individuals living with cognitive impairment.”

“Nursing homes and long-term care organizations are implementing this nonpharmacological and affordable intervention both nationally and internationally,” said Ihara. But what’s next?

Given the benefits of personalized music for individuals living with dementia, development of a wearable device will give researchers some hard data on how listening to music can physically impact a person’s body.

“Our data thus far is observational,” said Ihara. “We see that patients are humming or smiling or rocking to the music. But we want to see what to see what’s going on inside—and we have the technology now to collect that information,” she said.

Through the prototype development process, the research team will triangulate the physiological, observational, and self-reported effects of personalized music for individuals living with dementia. This will inform how to further digitize the intervention, allowing for scale-up in a large randomized clinical trial.

Understanding and Combating Misconceptions about Palliative Care Using Artificial Intelligence

Megumi Inoue, associate professor in the Department of Social Work

On the surface, machine learning and big data may not seem to play an important role in palliative care. Megumi Inoue, associate professor in the Department of Social Work, is quick to correct misconceptions about palliative care, pointing out that the term “palliative care” does not necessarily mean end-of-life care.

“Palliative care is about symptom management,” said Inoue. “One of the misconceptions about palliative care is that it’s the same as hospice care. But that’s not true—with palliative care, anyone can use it.”

With such pervasive misinformation about palliative care, Inoue made it her mission to address these misconceptions. And what better way than to go the source of many of these misnomers—the internet.

Inoue is working with an interdisciplinary team: Mahdi Hashemi from Mason’s College of Engineering and Computing, Naoru Koizumi and Rajendra Kulkarni from Mason’s Schar School of Policy and Government, Denise Mohess from Inova Fairfax Hospital, and Matthew Kestenbaum from Capital Caring Health.

The team received a 2021 seed grant from Mason’s Institute for Digital InnovAtion (IDIA) for their project “Understanding the Impact of Misinformation on Palliative Care Demand Using Machine Learning and Qualitative Methods.”

The project will apply a methodology used mainly in the field of computer science to see what type of misinformation exists about palliative care online. They will use artificial intelligence (AI) information mining to scour the internet, including Twitter and Google, to see what is being said about palliative care.

“The impact of social media is huge,” she said “It’s a new data source for us and its reach is very important.”

Once the team goes through the data, the next step will be to conduct interviews and focus groups to further understand how misinformation about palliative care is heard and spread. The team’s goal is to help healthcare organizations strategically communicate about the benefits of palliative care to work with patients and their families more effectively.

“Palliative care is one of the fastest-growing medical specialties in health care,” said Inoue. “It saves money by reducing unnecessary treatment and it also provides comfort to patients.”

“At the same time, palliative care faces various challenges including misconceptions among the general public, a lack of awareness of its benefits, and limited and sporadic access and coverage by insurance companies,” Inoue said. She hopes her research can change this for the better.

Innovate for Good is an ongoing series that examines how Mason faculty in the College of Health and Human Services are harnessing technology to improve health outcomes.

If you have stories to share as part of the Innovate for Good series, email Mary Cunningham at mcunni7@gmu.edu.

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Institute for Digital InnovAtion (IDIA)

Tech Talent Investment Pipeline (TTIP)

TTIP

Tech Talent Investment Program

First-year of National Science Foundation-funded training project draws to a close with presentations on May 21

Martha Bushong — Tue, 11 May 2021 12:56:00 +0000

First-year of National Science Foundation-funded training project draws to a close with presentations on May 21 Martha Bushong Tue, 05/11/2021 - 08:56

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Meet the Trainees

See the Events Calendar

PhD students from a variety of disciplines have spent the year engaged in multi-disciplinary research projects as part of Mason’s first-ever National Science Foundation Research Traineeship grant. The students explored opioid use disorders, mental health in school-age children, and Parkinson’s disease. On May 21 from 2 to 4 p.m. they will present their project findings to the Mason community and other stakeholders.

The program is training the next generation of leaders to take on some of the most challenging problems faced by society today. These complex problems cannot be addressed by one individual or even one discipline. To address these challenges leaders will need to work together across traditional academic disciplinary boundaries to integrate engineering, data science, and social science knowledge, while meaningfully engaging with stakeholder communities in a mutually beneficial manner. The cohort included 11 students from seven different graduate programs.

“Working in multidisciplinary teams helped us gain a much deeper understanding of the real problem at hand, and freed us from the shackles of having to think within the silos of our science disciplines,” says Shriniwas Patwardhan, a PhD candidate in bioengineering. “We are able to think of a problem and how to solve it, without passing it through the filter of our individual disciplines. If not for multidisciplinary thinking, every problem looks like a nail because we have a hammer.”

Patwardhan and his fellow trainees became immersed in community settings to confront the traditional hierarchies between researchers and participants. They teamed up with community stakeholders as full participants in the research process and worked with them to identify challenges and needs, formulate research questions, and engage in participatory design to develop and test solutions.

“I have really enjoyed my experience with the trainees. Integrating patient input into every aspect of research and development is so necessary for success,” says Soania Mathur a physician, as well as a Parkinson’s patient and advocate.

“We are all really excited to share the progress we made on our projects over the past year despite the pandemic and look forward to the comments, questions, and feedback from the audience,” says Keri Anne Gladhill a third-year PhD who is studying cognitive-behavioral neuroscience concentration in the Psychology department.

For the NRT project, Gladhill and her team of Shriniwas Patwardhan and Lindsay Shaffer focused on understanding how people with Parkinson’s track and communicate both their motor and non-motor symptoms with their care team. The students sought to empower the patients (with Parkinson's) in their healthcare decisions by improving communication channels between the patients, their caregivers, and their physicians.

People with Parkinson's typically meet their physician one or two times a year, for 15-20 minutes. “In that short span of time, it is hard for the physician to get a good understanding of their varying symptoms throughout the year,” says Patwardhan, “That is why it would benefit the patients and their physicians greatly if the physician could see data related to their daily states in real-time.”

A wide variety of ways to track symptoms from pen and paper to wearable devices already exist; however, none of the existing methods allow for reliable, accurate, continuous, and accessible measurements. One approach to solve this problem is to establish a data-rich communication channel between the patients, their caregivers, and their physicians, by collecting data about motor and non-motor symptoms. The team members believe that If executed well, they could expand the same process to other chronic conditions and improve health outcomes while enabling mobile health solutions and more.

“The findings from our project could be interesting to people who are not interested in Parkinson's disease at all,” says Patwardhan. “We are trying to show that one way to overcome problems with multiple actors in a data-gathering loop is to establish data-rich and real-time communication channels. That may apply to anything from healthcare to solar power grids.”

Find out more about the projects and their teams.

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