Excuse the ableist headline......
Starting next year, a team led by Jeffrey Kaye, M.D., a professor of neurology and biomedical engineering at Oregon Health and Science University, will begin tracking the activities of 360 older adults using a network of sensors they’ve agreed to place in their homes. With research partners in other parts of the country, his team will be monitoring the vital signs, medication use, mobility, activities, sleep patterns, and phone and computer use of a cross-section of Americans, including African Americans in Chicago, Latinos in Miami, public housing residents in Portland, Ore., and veterans in rural communities. One of his goals in tracking older adults who are still relatively healthy is to identify the early signs of physical and cognitive decline—generating insights that may guide medical care and enable patients to retain their independence.
Kaye began developing the platform, known as Life Lab, more than 10 years ago and with a team of researchers, statisticians, and software developers has been analyzing data from over 700 volunteers. Early findings have been surprising. For one, patients' own reports—which doctors rely on to help determine diagnoses and treatment plans—aren’t entirely reliable.1 Asked to explain what they did in the last two hours, a quarter were wrong and another third were only partially right. "They knew we had the data on what they were doing, and they weren’t cognitively impaired," Kaye says." "They just couldn’t remember accurately what they’d done.'Another finding was that patterns in movement and behavior seemed to track cognitive impairment. For example, variable walking speed, less time spent away from home, and less time spent on computers “individually and together create a very strong signal that the person is in the early stages of cognitive decline," he says.