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Marjorie Skubic
IEEE Fellow and Associate Professor
of Electrical and Computer
Engineering, University of Missouri,
Columbia, USA
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Since 2005, IEEE Fellow Marjorie Skubic, associate
professor of electrical and computer engineering
at the University of Missouri, Columbia, and her
team of researchers have been deploying—in
seniors’ residences at an “aging in
place” facility—networks of motion
sensors, bed sensors, and, most recently, video
sensors, with the goal of developing software
algorithms that can help to identify early signs
of illness and promote early intervention.
As a person ages, Skubic explains, his/her
health and functional ability tend to decline in a
stair-step process, staying constant on a
“plateau” until a dramatic health
event or illness causes a decline to a lower
plateau, and so on. By using specially developed
algorithms to analyze the data from the sensors,
Skubic says she aims to come up with a way to
predict the moment of decline to the lower
plateau. This may allow the length of each
plateau—the period of stasis before a new
decline in health—to be extended, and the
steepness of the next decline to be reduced.
Skubic’s work is unique because of
its integration of ordinary consumer electronics
to incorporate sophisticated “computer
vision” in the predictive analysis. She and
her team use a pair of networked, consumer-grade
Webcams, together with proprietary gait analysis
software, to study the silhouettes of residents
and detect falls.
Of course, Skubic’s is not the only
research team developing new technology to promote
healthy aging. The field has garnered attention
and gained momentum worldwide, she notes, pointing
to similar research initiatives overseas. These
include The Enable Project, a European Union
collaboration by researchers in Finland,
Lithuania, Norway and the U.K., aimed at helping
people with mild to moderate dementia maintain
normal lives.
Ultimately, Skubic says she would like to
see her work used as the basis for aging-in-place
and home health remote monitoring products and
services suitable for private homes. Yet while she
remains optimistic that this eventually will
occur, she acknowledges that it’s more
likely these will emerge in assisted living
centers first.
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