Planning Grant: Engineering Research Center for Healthy and Safe Aging (ERC-HSA)

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The Planning Grants for Engineering Research Centers competition was run as a pilot solicitation within the ERC program. Planning grants are not required as part of the full ERC competition, but intended to build capacity among teams to plan for convergent, center-scale engineering research.Between 2016 and 2050, the number of older adults (age65) in the US will grow from 49 million to 84 million. The combination of the growing aging population with increasingly complex care needs presents a major societal challenge to deliver safe, effective and efficient health care. While older adults prefer to stay in their home or a familiar environment, they also require health services, but are at high risk for patient safety issues and healthcare-associated harm when interacting with the healthcare delivery system. We need to develop technologies that can help older adults stay healthy and safe longer: this includes supporting safe interactions of older adults with the healthcare system (e.g. emergency room, hospital). We plan to develop an ERC for Healthy and Safe Aging (ERC-HSA) that will engage multiple disciplines (engineering, health sciences) and older adults and their caregivers to develop older-care-application-specific smart sensing technologies and integrate them into the overall coordinated older adult care system. The proposed ERC-HSA will be integrated in the newly created Wisconsin Institute for Healthcare Systems Engineering at UW-Madison and will benefit from complementary expertise of researchers at other Universities. During the ERC planning stage, we will work with various universities and local groups to develop strategies and programs aimed at enhancing diversity of our future students and addressing ageism, i.e. biases targeted at older adults. We will also build stronger ties with the health technology industry in the Greater Madison area as well as along the ?Health Highway?, a 600-mile Midwestern stretch that spans four states and represents a growing healthcare ecosystem.The proposed ERC-HSA will develop a convergent research agenda organized around expertise in sensor technologies, data analytics and system design that will be combined with deep knowledge about aging care to develop technologies that effectively address the societal problem of healthy and safe aging. With advice of experts in strategic planning, team science, diversity and aging, we will coordinate various activities, including webinar on team science and team research, targeted roundtables and a workshop with industry. We will organize roundtables to develop the innovative convergent research program and create opportunities for conversations among researchers from various backgrounds. Older adults and their caregivers and healthcare professionals will actively participate in these activities as we propose to do research not on older adults, but with and for older adults. We will blend expertise in three thrust areas: (1) human-centered modeling, simulation and design of patient work and clinical workflow, (2) health/healthcare data analytics, and (3) sensors and sensing technologies. Our goal is to go beyond designing siloed and fragmented technologies and promote innovative convergent research that will design the next generation of technologies for healthy and safe aging.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.