NIA Grant Launches New AI, Aging, Alzheimer’s Research Center

The University of Massachusetts Amherst and Brigham and Women’s Hospital announced the launch of the new Massachusetts AI and Technology Center for Connecter Care in Aging and Alzheimer’s Disease (MassAITC).

The center, funded through a National Institute on Aging (NIA) grant, will pursue improving in-home care for older adults and individuals with Alzheimer’s disease. The award is expected to total around $20 million over five years.

MassAITC is a collaborative venture between UMass Amherst, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Massachusetts General Hospital, Brandeis University, and Northeastern University. The center will live at UMass Amherst, leveraging extensive expertise, access to patient cohorts, and resources from other partner institutions around Massachusetts.

The center is co-led by Deepak Ganesan, professor in UMass Amherst’s Robert and Donna Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS), and Niteesh Choudhry, director of the Center for Healthcare Delivery Sciences in the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School.

“We are pleased that UMass Amherst will house this new center, which brings together such distinguished institutions from across the Commonwealth,” UMass Amherst Chancellor Kumble R. Subbaswamy said in a press release.

“The Center will leverage the campus’s considerable expertise in AI and life sciences to develop advanced care for Alzheimer’s patients and address healthcare disparities associated with the disease. Applying groundbreaking research and innovation to real-world problems is central to the mission of the flagship campus.”

According to Paul Anderson, senior vice president of research and education at Brigham and Women’s, artificial intelligence could potentially transform the future of science and medicine. Additionally, there is a critical need to bring the capabilities of AI to those who need it most.

“This grant will allow experts from across our state to come together to help address this key gap,” Anderson said.

According to researchers, more than 90 percent of older Americans would prefer to stay in their homes as they age. However, chronic diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, make it difficult for older populations to remain at home without substantial support.

While at-home healthcare technologies can provide some assistance, they are not explicitly developed for older adults or Alzheimer’s patients, caregivers, and clinicians. Additionally, more current treatment and intervention strategies are limited in terms of being delivered remotely and adapted to the patient’s needs.

MassAITC seeks to address the healthcare disparities by advancing AI research and development. The center will close gaps in interdisciplinary research by gathering data on the perspectives of patients, caregivers, clinicians, behavioral scientists, and other stakeholders. These perspectives will then be used to improve artificial intelligence and machine learning methods.

“MassAITC also brings together outstanding capabilities from across the Commonwealth, including state-of-the-art facilities for rapid AI-enhanced technology development and patient cohorts to facilitate validation of these technologies in real-world, at-home settings,” said Choudhry.