Northeastern University
Holly Jimison’s current research is focused on technology for successful aging and scalable remote care for older adults and patients with chronic conditions. Her projects involve sensors in the home for continuous monitoring and addressing the challenges of big data related to large amounts of complex and noisy streaming data from multiple sources used to infer clinically relevant health behaviors. Her three current projects are 1) self-navigating robot used to connect persons with cognitive challenges with remote loved ones, 2) a mobile app to encourage CPAP use for patients and their partners in the home, and 3) a caregiver support system for caregivers of persons with MCI that provides tailored just-in-time alerts and recommendations based on home monitoring and stress data from the dyad.
This third project is part of the AI Caring Institute. The goal of this project is to provide caregivers of older adults with dementia a holistic system to support their caregiving needs as well as the health and wellbeing of the person with dementia and the caregiver themselves. Our development builds upon current methods of home monitoring, communications technologies, and existing databases of caregiver resources. We are using a mobile app for caregivers from EmPowerYu, Inc. that provides home monitoring, behavior inferences, and feedback for caregivers as our base system. Our additional contributions include tailored just-in-time alerts and recommendations based on inferences from location monitoring, as well as real-time stress data from both the person with dementia and their caregiver. We use the CareNav system from the Family Caregiving Institute at UC Davis as a source for messaging and providing tailored access to educational and local caregiver resources.