STTR Phase I: Advanced and Remote Screening, Monitoring and Rehabilitation of Cognitive Health

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The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I project is to improve and automate cognitive health screening mechanisms used in hospital facilities, by designing and validating a smart chair and a smart wearable based health data-centric novel solution. U.S. population has more than 16 million people (this is rapidly growing further) living with cognitive impairment. There is alarming fact that people with cognitive impairment report more than three times as many hospital stays as individuals with other health conditions. These are driving development of improved cognitive health assessment solutions, that will detect subtle signs of cognitive decline early in daily life. Motivated by these markets in demand, this project is designed to develop a system for advanced and remote screening and monitoring of cognitive health, and also enabling gamified user interaction for cognitive rehabilitation. The developed technology has large potential to help elderly people prone to levels of dementia (from mild cognitive impairment to Alzheimer's disease), and slowly rehabilitating patients dealing with cognitive decline (stroke survivors and cancer patients under treatment). The designed platform and cognitive scoring algorithms developed in this project will be tested and validated with real patient study at hospital facility.The proposed project is a research, development and clinical studies effort to design and validate an advanced and remote screening, monitoring and rehabilitation solution for cognitive health. Such cognitive health management system will be achieved by technological innovation in multi-modal sensing and machine learning based behavioral data analytics from a smart chair and a custom wearable device (used separately), along with cognitive psychology driven gamified interactions and interventions. The smart chair system will capture patient non-verbal response and stress patterns, when answering to cognitive questionnaire. The smart wearable system (used with a few custom Bluetooth beacons in proximity) will analyze normalcy, forgetfulness, confusion in patient, while performing daily life cognitive tasks (such as baking a cake or cookie) in home-like kitchen facility in hospital. The main research objective includes two novel cognitive health scoring mechanism from user response with chair based cognitive questionnaire, and wearable based cognitive task performance quality. It will also design user interactions and interventions for cognitive rehabilitation and behavior reinforcement. This is a very impactful project with team's direct ongoing collaboration with hospital and neurologist, and access to large number of patients with range of cognitive disabilities (in accordance with IRB and HIPAA compliance).