New devices designed to catch signs of declining health

Researchers want to visit older adults living alone to equip such everyday items as a pillbox, telephone or sofa with wireless, computerized sensors. The hope is to use those small sensors to track any decline in their cognitive or physical abilities long before either normally would be noticed.

"We'll deploy the prototypes for the first time," said Matthew Lee, a doctoral student in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University and a research team member.

Lee made it sound like the center, a joint program of CMU and the University of Pittsburgh, is going to war. And, in a way, the researchers are doing just that, for their ultimate goal is to identify these declines so early that they might be halted, or at least delayed, by medical or occupational interventions.

"If we can introduce these interventions earlier, they might have more effect on the individual," said Anind Dey, CMU associate professor in the institute and another team member.

Eventually, the team will install sensors in the residences of between 30 and 50 people. The participants must be at least 65, capable of giving their consent and be at risk for the cognitive and physical declines as determined by medical and behavioral assessments and screenings.

The researchers will do their outlined work with the help of a $480,000 grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Project HealthDesign. The local team is among five nationally to be funded for the two-year project.

Diane Collins, assistant professor of rehabilitation science and technology at the University of Pittsburgh, has a different take on the use of the technology. Instead of measuring decline, she sees it as a way for families to keep watch over loved ones.

"As jobs become more scarce and people have to move away, they have this worry of caring for elderly family," she said. "This remote sensing is much less threatening than if you have a video camera there. Say it's my mom ... and I know she's not doing well and she just had surgery, I can tell if she got out of bed by a sensor in the mat by her bed."

The information collected can be used to make helpful changes in an elderly person's environment, Collins said, with tools such as commode chairs, or to discover that the living arrangement no longer suits their needs.

The team is looking at four different activities: taking medications, preparing meals, phone use and restlessness in bed or on a chair.

Sensors attached to the everyday items used in those activities transmit data to the team's main computer, where it can be viewed by doctors, occupational therapists, families and even the residents themselves, who will have monitors in their homes.