ENGINEER SPOTLIGHT: Tamara Hayes - Biomedical Engineer
- House Calls for the New Millennium
In the future, it may not be our family doctor, or
our friends, or even our family who are the first to
notice when our memory starts to slip. If Tamara Hayes’
research is any indication, the first warnings that
our health is flagging will come from our houses.
“I really do imagine a time when, rather than
running off to a clinic to see what’s wrong with
me my doctor can get all my health information from
data gathered by my house,” says Hayes, a biomedical
engineering professor at Oregon Health & Science
University. In fact, she continues, the doctor can get
better information because the house is a purely objective
observer. It doesn’t play hooky, and it doesn’t
try to appear healthier than it is.
Hayes’ research involves gathering data from
different types of sensors placed throughout a person’s
home. The information, she and her colleagues hope,
will help ferret out behavioral changes that indicate
the early stages of dementia and Alzheimer’s.
“The technologies themselves are pretty simple,”
Hayes explains. Her monitoring toolkit includes motion
sensors, contact sensors, computer keyboard sensors
and mouse movement sensors.
Hayes makes her patients play video games so she can
see if they’re progressing or if they’re
relearning the game’s tasks over and over. There’s
even an electronic medicine box that records when people
take their medicine. According to Hayes, people who
have early memory loss were four times more likely to
forget to take their medicine. That’s a problem
if the medicine is supposed to halt memory loss in the
first place.
People don’t usually realize when they are in
the early stages of diseases such as Alzheimer’s
or dementia. If they experience any memory loss, they
chalk it up to general forgetfulness or they just forget
that they’re forgetting. Because doctors see a
patient only a few times a year, they often don’t
notice the signs until the disease has progressed to
more advanced stages. This means patients get treated
later when medications are less effective.
Because it’s constantly monitoring a subject,
Hayes’ sensor system could pick up on early behavioral
changes most doctors miss. She recently completed a
study in which she used sensor data to compare the behavior
of otherwise healthy seniors to those in the early stages
of dementia. The underlying concept is that everyone
has a pattern of behavior that’s normal for them,
Hayes explains. “When that pattern changes, it
could be indicative of a medical problem.” In
this study, she found people with dementia tend to move
around more and have a more variable routine than their
healthy counterparts.
Hayes just started a more comprehensive sensor-monitoring
study that will gather data from 300 people over the
age of 75 for three years. During the course of the
experiment, a substantial portion of the subjects will
develop dementia or Alzheimer’s. Hayes thinks
that with the data she and her colleagues gather, they
will be able to pick up on the more subtle behavioral
changes that underlie larger health problems. “We’ll
be able to say, ‘This is the indicator. We didn’t
realize it at the time, but now we know,’”
she explains.
If the home monitoring sounds Big Brotherish to you,
you’re not alone. Hayes says she sometimes encounters
that attitude from her younger students and colleagues,
due in large part to the fact that younger folks don’t
usually need this kind of scrutiny … yet. “Older
people don’t feel that way,” she notes.
“I never have problems recruiting volunteers.
They say they’ll try anything that can keep them
in their homes—and out of nursing homes—longer.”
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