HOME: Multimodal Remote Health Monitoring for In-Home Senior Care

An aging population and severe caregiver shortage have created an urgent need for intelligent senior care solutions. Existing technologies fail to address complex geriatric needs in an end-to-end, privacy-preserving manner. Our multidisciplinary team (spanning IoT, AI/ML, geriatric neuropsychology, and speech science) aims to bridge this gap by designing HOME, a multimodal cyber physical system (CPS) that combines multimodal sensing, adaptive AI, and human-in-the-loop expert control to deliver actionable, real-world monitoring to enhance senior quality-of-life and ease caregiver strain.

Millions of Americans face Alzheimer’s disease and related cognitive impairments, yet early diagnosis remains out of reach for many due to limited access to specialized care. Because early intervention is critical, spoken language offers a powerful, noninvasive biomarker to transform how cognitive decline is detected. As a first step toward our broader vision for multimodal in-home care, our pilot project focuses on speech as our primary sensing modality. Supported by the CITRIS AI and Health Seed Fund, we are building an interpretable AI/ML pipeline that analyzes everyday conversational data to identify early signs of mild cognitive impairment and dementia. Designed for telehealth, clinical, and aging-in-place settings, this unobtrusive screening tool empowers clinicians and researchers with accessible, early-stage decision support.

This project will combine PI Weakley's remote caregiving platform (I-Care) with PI Pan's multimodal sensing system, PI Cohn's expertise in acoustic analysis, and PI Chuah's network systems and machine learning expertise to support he Geriatric 4 Ms (Mentation, Mobility, Medication, and what Matters). This project will culminate with a community deployment of our system at Eskaton senior living community.

People

Principal Investigators

Students

  • Tejas Patil, CS, UC Davis (PhD)
  • Yui Ishihara, ECE, UC Davis (PhD)
  • Joseph Hoang, CS, UC Davis (MS)
  • Dong Yoon Lee, CSE, UC Merced (PhD)

Visiting Students from Keio University

  • Yuho Tamura
  • Kenyu IKeuchi
  • Taichi Okunishi

Publications

  • T. Patil, P. Koppolu, A. Gohil, P. Yadav, C.-N. Chuah, S. Aswar, S. Tomaszewski Farias, A. Weakley, "Evaluating Integrated Multimedia Communication Designed for Cognitive Accessibility within a Remote Caregiving Platform," Applied Human Factors and Ergonomics (AHFE) Hawaii International Conference on Human Factors in Design, Engineering, and Computing, Dec 2026.
  • P. Koppolu, A. Gohil, T. Patil, P. Yadav, M. Cohn, C.-N. Chuah, S. Span, S. Tomaszewski Farias, A. Weakley, "Streamlining Remote Care: Computer Access Solutions for Older Adults with Cognitive Impairment," Applied Human Factors and Ergonomics (AHFE) Hawaii International Conference on Human Factors in Design, Engineering, and Computing, Dec 2026.
  • A. Gohil, D. Bissig, H.-C. Wang, P. Koppolu, T. Patil, P. Yadav, S. Aswar, S. Span, M. Cohn, C.-N. Chuah, S. Tomaszewski Farias, A. Weakley, "Embedding Self-Administered Dementia Monitoring into a Remote Caregiving Platform: A Pilot Usability and Data-Sharing Preferences Study" Applied Human Factors and Ergonomics (AHFE) Hawaii International Conference on Human Factors in Design, Engineering, and Computing, Dec 2026.
  • P. Yadav, H. Agarwal, P. Koppolu, A. Gohil, T. Patil, C.-N. Chuah, S. Pan, S. Aswar, S. Pimento, M. Cohn, and A. Wekaley, "Bounded Delegation of a Large Language Model in a Conversational Agent for Dementia Support," IEEE International Conference on AI x Medicine, Health, and Care (AIxMHC) AI for Seniors Workshop, Laguna Hills, CA, September 2026.
  • K. Ikeuchi, T. Ohtsuki, M. Cohn, A. Weakley, Y. Ishihara, J. Hoang, T. Kishimoto, S. Farias, J. Vonk, C. Chuah, "Cross-Linguistic Acoustic Biomarkers of Cognitive Impairment Across Interactive and Single-Speaker Speech Tasks," International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC), July 2026.
  • M. Cohn, A. Lanzi, Y. Ishihara, C.-N. Chuah, G. Zellou, and A. Weakley, "Challenges in Automatic Speech Recognition for Adults with Cognitive Impairment," ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), pp. 4262-4272, April 2026.
Thesis/Reports

  • Yui Ishihara, "Evaluating Linguistic Pattern Learning in Large Language Models for Dementia Detection" M.S. Plan-I Thesis, 2026.

Funding and In Kind Support

This project is supported by NIH NIBIB# 1R01EB041352 grant titled "SCH: HOME: Health-Oriented Monitoring Empowered by Multimodal Cyber-Physical Systems for Geriatric Care" and foundational Digital Health/AI Seed Grant from CITRIS and the Banatao Institute.

We are thankful for the support from the UC Davis Healthy Aging in a Digital World Initiative (Tod Stoltz, Thomas Nesbitt, Heather M. Young), Eskaton (Therese Ten Brinke), the UC Davis Alzheimer's Disease Research Center, and the National Institute on Aging (NIA).

Visiting students from Keio University are supported under the ASPIRE project.