Researchers from UC Merced and UC Davis are putting into practice work aimed at helping older adults maintain independence where they live while providing loved ones and caretakers with real-time updates on their health .
A four-year, $1.1 million R01 award from the National Institutes of Health will help fund "SCH: HOME: Health-Oriented Monitoring Empowered by Multimodal Cyber-Physical Systems for Geriatric Care."
Principal investigator Shijia Pan of UC Merced along with co-investigators Alyssa Weakley, Chen-Nee Chuah and Michelle Cohn of UC Davis will develop a plug-and-play, multi-agent system that integrates multimodal sensing, adaptive learning, and human-in-the-loop intelligence to monitor and support older adults' health and care at senior living communities.
Pan, a computer science and engineering professor, researches how to make smart devices more pervasive, intelligent and interactive.
"Basically, we are trying to investigate how human information can be recognized through subtle physical signals they generate," Pan said. Instead of relying on a camera or microphone or requiring the subject to wear a device, their multimodal system uses ambient sensors such as vibration, humidity and temperature to detectsubtle interactions between people and their environment, then use AI to interpret these signals. "I think we are really at the perfect era of AI to advance this technology to make a real impact."
While the project uses cutting-edge technology and machine learning, the human element is no less important, the researchers said.
"There may be something that is observed by our system, but we don't want it to make a decision," Weakley said. "At that point, we bring in a clinician so they connect in near real time, can make sense of the data and make a clinical decision."
The system can alert caretakers to issues before they become larger problems. For example, perhaps there is a change in the way the room occupant is walking.
"Maybe they had a stumble, or maybe they're just not feeling well," Weakley said.
The data from the system would encourage a clinician to check on the resident and potentially identify something such as a sprained knee or a urinary tract infection while it's still easily treatable.
The effort gained early support through a seed grant from CITRIS and the Banatao Institute, Healthy Aging in a Digital World Initiative at UC Davis and a UC Davis Alzheimer's Disease Research Center Development Project Award. Those awards gave researchers the opportunity to explore ideas, build their collaboration, develop patent-ready protypes, and lay the foundation for this project.
The researchers are working with Eskaton, a nonprofit senior living community with multiple senior living environments, to implement two pilot projects.
"The first step is to understand what their priorities are to make sure we're going to take care of what they are wanting," Weakley said.
In terms of costs, early estimates put the sensor system at roughly $1,000, with a monthly fee for monitoring. As the pilots grow and the systems are mass produced, the researchers believe the cost will drop. Pan estimated the system could be on the market within a couple of years.
Weakley and Pan have also recently been accepted by the ALTITUT SBIR Studio Cohort 2026 to work on the commercialization side of this work through their university spinoff AnSense Inc. Participants in this program receive early seed funding and guidance on intellectual property, business modeling and the federal Small Business Innovation Research program, helping academic researchers bring their technology to market.
"What we are doing is bridging the gap between monitoring and actionable care," Pan said. "Now that we have monitoring information, we are developing AI to translate this monitoring information to practical recommendations that are meaningful and actionable for caregivers."
The project has exciting potential to help lower the costs of senior health care and extend the independence of a growing older population.
"The longer you can stay at home the less expensive it will be," Weakley said. "And in an assisted living environment, they have levels of care and each level or tier costs more. If we can keep people at lower levels of care, we can keep costs lower."
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