NEWS

Nursing Professor Receives Grant to Study Symptom Management in Heart Failure Patients

"By better understanding the thought process behind a patient's decision to seek care we can come up with smarter ways to help patients and their families manage the condition from home rather than a hospital bed."
Recognizing new or worsening symptoms and knowing when to seek care can be difficult for patients with chronic heart failure and their families. Jill Quinn, PhD, RN, ANP, an assistant professor at the University of Rochester School of Nursing, has been awarded more than $300,000 from the American Heart Association (AHA) to research how four factors—symptom perception, depression, quality of life perception and the influence of family caregivers—impact a patient’s ability to recognize symptoms and decide to seek medical care.

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Inside a Toddler’s Mind

By Kate Perry
A new wireless system developed by University researchers is offering an unprecedented look at how toddlers deal with stressful situations.
Called WiPsy (wireless technology for psychological research), the technology is the result of collaboration by the University’s Mt. Hope Family Center and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering through an effort called Project Connect.
“The WiPsy system is going to give us a very sophisticated and unobtrusive way to assess a child’s reactions with computerized physiological and behavioral data,” says Melissa Sturge-Apple, a research associate at the Mt. Hope Family Center.
Wendi Heinzelman, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering and codesigner of the system, says the information will give researchers insights not possible with simple observation alone.
The system is being developed and tested at the Mt. Hope Family Center where Sturge-Apple and grant collaborator Fred Rogosch, the research director at Mt. Hope, and others assess and treat families experiencing dysfunction and children at risk for social and emotional difficulties.

Center receives $ 1.2M for Proactive Self Care Research

Center for Future Health Awarded Funding for Proactive Self-Care Technology

Center for Future Health Co-Founder Alice Pentland, chair of dermatology at the University of Rochester Medical Center; Technical Director Mark Bocko, chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering; and Executive Director and Chief Operating Officer Cecelia Horwitz.

Wearable IT Systems to Monitor and Predict Cardiac Health
With the development of new self-care technology, tiny wearable health monitors may one day continuously collect signals from the body and transmit data to a base station in the home. Predictive software may identify trends and make specific health predictions, so users can prevent crises and better manage daily routines and health interventions.

The Center for Future Health at the University of Rochester has received an $800,000 grant to lead a project in proactive self-care care technology. The Pioneer Portfolio of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) awarded the funds in the second part of a two-phase project. RWJF also supported the exploratory phase with an earlier grant of $372,000, for a combined total of nearly $1.2 million.

Albert Shar, RWJF vice president, said, "The Center for Future Health is forging a dynamic new field with this work, and we welcome the opportunity to play a role." He said the foundation "is very excited about the project" as it applies "key expertise from other fields to develop information patients can use to lead healthier lives and manage their care."

Researchers at the University, in collaboration with six private companies, dedicated the first phase to understanding the need for personal health monitoring technology. The current research phase is expected to take 12 months and supports the engineering of a system for cardiac monitoring.

Mark Bocko, technical director of the center and chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, said many measurable features in a health state can be detected before a person feels symptoms. Fluid can collect in lungs, for example, days before a person experiences shortness of breath.

Traditionally, he said, people see a doctor once or twice a year for intermittent snapshots of their health; they get sick, go to the hospital, get fixed, and go home. The project represents a new view of health care away from that of crisis-management mode. He said the team sought to find out how to put technology in the hands of people to let them monitor their health signs on an ongoing basis, and signal them about trends and warning signs when things may be changing.

Cecelia Horwitz, executive director and chief operating officer of the center, said, "Using our approach, people will be better able to make their own health management decisions. They will have control of their information, and can choose to send it to their health care providers. There will be a lot more health status information shared between them." The existing acute care system developed over centuries, she said, with the last century seeing the home play a very small part, and the individual an even smaller part. People have not possessed personal health information early enough to prevent acute episodes, and the new self-care technology will empower consumers.
Alice Pentland, chair of dermatology at the University of Rochester Medical Center, co-founder of the Center for Future Health, and winner of the 2002 MD Future of Health Technology award, said the idea is to develop an integrated health care system based on consumer-health technology. To help design features, the researchers led focus groups made up of patients, family caregivers, and medical doctors from the University of Rochester Medical Center. The researchers learned the technology should be noninvasive; users don't want to fiddle with PDAs, gadgets, and sensors, and want to avoid drawing attention with beeps or other noticeable reminders. And, users want the technology to let them preserve information privacy.

Ambient Technology
The system incorporates ambient technology; technology that goes with the person everywhere and, according to Horwitz, can look at motion, activity, the sounds of voice and breathing, and how they all intersect.

Pentland said signals, previously unquantified, will become meaningful information. "Ambient technology is about things that happen just because you're alive. You walk, talk, breathe, have people come to visit. If you're well, there is a pattern, if you're sick, the pattern is different. When you interact with people, if you look bad, they can tell. They don't need to take your blood pressure. Visible and audible changes in behavior are real data. If you're laughing, if you're drawn, if the color of your skin changes or you look sweaty; all of that can be assessed ambiently."

Trends and Data
In designing health-monitoring devices, turning large amounts of raw data into usable, meaningful information becomes a challenge. Recognizing trends in a big body of data, according to Bocko, is a big field in itself. The researchers brought in companies for this and other areas of niche expertise such as product design, user-friendly interfacing, automation, and human factor design.
"It's very stimulating and very exciting to work with this talented group of people," said Horwitz.

Corporate collaborators from the Rochester area include Impact Technologies, LLC; Xelic; KEK Associates, Inc; and STI Technologies, Inc. Other collaborators include Foster-Miller of Waltham, Mass.; and RLW, Inc., of State College, Pa.
The team hopes to apply what they learn with the cardiac care project to the monitoring of other disease and of normal health. The project fits in with the center's focus on health monitoring and ongoing research in motion understanding, conversational computerized personal health assessment, and "middleware"; the interface between network protocols. The center also continues research on its Smart Bandage, which monitors pathogens, allergens, and general health status.
The Pioneer Portfolio of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation provides the major portion of funding for this research with the participating companies each contributing additional funds.

About the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Pioneer Portfolio
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation www.rwjf.org focuses on the pressing health and health care issues facing our country. As the nation's largest philanthropy devoted exclusively to improving the health and health care of all Americans, the Foundation works with a diverse group of organizations and individuals to identify solutions and achieve comprehensive, meaningful, and timely change. Projects in the Pioneer Portfolio are typically future-oriented and look beyond conventional thinking to explore solutions at the cutting edge of health and health care.

NPR Interview on Healthy Friday

Ways to stay healthy even as we age is discussed on NPR radio, August  21,2007  Podcast available at : http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/wxxi/.jukebox?action=viewPodcast&podcastId=1534

James Allen receives Outstanding Paper Award

In July, a group led by James Allen won an Outstanding Paper Award at 
the Twenty-Second AAAI Conference Conference on Artificial 
Intelligence in Vancouver, BC, Canada. The paper, entitled ``PLOW: A 
Collaborative Task Learning Agent,'' describes a prototype system 
with which a user can teach the computer to perform tasks on the web, 
such as finding information or filling out forms. The research is 
part of the group's broader goal of developing intelligent 
conversational assistants that interact naturally to help people 
solve problems. For more information, please visit: http://www.cs.rochester.edu/research/cisd/projects/plow

Feb 14, 2006: Self Care's Promising Future

Self-care and self- monitoring technology has the potential to bridge the current health system with the growing demands of an aging population.
Robert Wood Johnson Foundation asks CFH, "How will technologies being tested today promise to help aging individuals stay healthy or keep chronic diseases in check. What is important to consumers and their non-professional caregivers?" Review this article by Robert Wood Johnson as well as the Self Care Technology Information Center (www.selfcaretech.org) which describes technology for heart failure and dementia self care. The time frame is 2005-6.

March-April, 2006: Health Through Timepiece

Rochester Magazine describes how your watch may soon be smart enough to watch out for your health. Click here to view article.

The Center for Future Health Goes to Washington D.C.

The Center for Future Health (CFH) at the University of Rochester was one of six universities featured at the White House Conference on Aging, December 11-13, 2005. This event, held once every ten years, had over 1000 participants from across the nation attend to support resolutions that encourage the development and application of technologies to meet the needs of older adults. As part of the Imagine pavilion sponsored by the Center for Aging Services Technology (CAST), CFH demonstrated its research in ways of interpreting motion and activity as a new vital sign and the development of a conversational assistant. 

In their early stages, many diseases such as stroke, dementia, and Parkinson’s disease, manifest themselves as subtle changes in movement.  Speed, fluency, and quality of motion may be affected. Understanding your normal patterns and capturing early changes provide a window into your health status before conventional methods can detect such changes. We are looking at motion analysis as a continuum of both time and scale, from hand tremors in short periods, to gait analysis, to movement in homes over longer periods of time. Currently the CFH motion understanding research is being conducted with Alzheimer’s patients in their homes through a grant from the Alzheimer’s Association.

Mark Bocko, PhD, Chair, Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering (right), is leading the research on motion understanding. James Allen, PhD, Computer Scientist, (left) demonstrated his work with “Chester the Talking Pill”, a natural language conversational interface that acts as a single point of contact for your personal health system.

This conversational interface can help you manage conditions, medications, activities, and decisions quickly and efficiently without the need for a keyboard or training.

Others from CFH who participated were Alice Pentland, MD, Director, Cecelia Horwitz, MBA, Associate Director, and Devon Wiley, student intern.

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