The University of Waterloo is home to innovators looking to accelerate the applications of technology in healthcare and well-being. Centre for Bioengineering and Biotechnology Member Dr. Plinio Morita, who is also an Assistant Professor at the University of Waterloo, the Director of the UbiLab, and the J.W. Graham Information Technology Emerging Leader Chair in Applied Health Informatics, looks to design zero-effort technology that can be used with minimal burden to its user, for applications in areas such as wearables, zero-effort sensors for patient monitoring, and eHealth technology design.
Currently, Professor Morita is working to explore the applications of Smart Home Technology for at home health monitoring. Smart Home technology can provide homeowners with a sense of security, convenience, and comfort by enabling remote monitoring of appliances, lighting systems, and heating systems. However, through the use of wearable sensors and modern communication technologies, smart home technologies have potential for applications in health that could allow for the remote monitoring of one’s health behaviors and population-level surveillance of health behaviours.
Using Ecobee’s Smart Thermostat Technology and Samsung’s Smartthings Hub, Professor Morita and his team at UbiLab, including Master’s Student Nicholas Puchois of Pierre and Marie Curie University, are looking to apply the thermostat’s occupancy sensing technology for the remote monitoring of patient behaviors to leverage its potential in predicting the onset of dementia and other mental health conditions.
Professor Morita envisions that Ecobee’s occupancy sensing technology could become integrated into a monitoring system to keep track of health patterns and movement behaviors, such as sleeping time and amount of physical activity performed. For instance, if the monitoring system learns that a patient has a regular routine, but disruptions begin to occur, such as sleep disturbances and variations in behavioural patterns, the system can analyze this data to indicate the possible onset of dementia or other mental health conditions.
Behavioral abnormalities such as these are common characteristics of early stage dementia1, and notification of such behaviors before they escalate can give care providers the opportunity to act and treat these conditions proactively. Moreover, this system could be implemented as a remote patient monitoring tool to collect health data, preventing unnecessary hospital visits. Additionally, Ecobee’s smart thermostat is both hands-free and non-intrusive, removing the burden of patients having to remember to wear a device to track their health behaviors in the first place.
More of Professor Morita's work cab be seen on his lab page.
References
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Wang, H., Zheng, H., Augusto, J. C., Martin, S., Mulvenna, M., Carswell, W., … & McSorley, K. (2010, December). Monitoring and analysis of sleep pattern for people with early dementia. In Bioinformatics and Biomedicine Workshops (BIBMW), 2010 IEEE International Conference on (pp. 405-410). IEEE.