Please join us for an AI + Health Seminar with Edison Thomaz, Associate Professor and William H. Hartwig Fellow, Electrical and Computer Engineering, UT Austin.

When: April 24, 2025, noon-12:30pm
Zoom: https://utexas.zoom.us/j/5128555388

Title: Identifying Digital Biomarkers of Cognitive Impairment from Real World Activity Data

Abstract: Alzheimer's Disease and Related Dementias (ADRD) affect more than 6 million people in the U.S. and more than 55 million people worldwide. Currently, there are no known treatments to prevent or stop the progression of this disease. The toll on individuals, caregivers and society is enormous and will increase as the population ages unless effective interventions are developed. In this talk, I will describe TechSANS, our ongoing research effort aimed at discovering digital behavior biomarkers that characterize ADRD severity from mobile and wearable sensor data. I will go over challenges and preliminary findings of our multi-year longitudinal study, including data collection, digital biomarker candidates, and perceptions around privacy. The long term vision of TechSANS is to pioneer a new time of practical and naturalistic continuous assessment of cognitive function as a complement to traditional cognitive evaluation instruments.

Speaker Bio: Edison Thomaz is an Associate Professor and William H. Hartwig Fellow in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin, where he directs the Human Signals Laboratory. His research is on human-centered machine learning, sensing and perception using wearable and ubiquitous technologies. A key focus of the Human Signals Lab is digital health and personalized medicine such as building health models and tools that can characterize and forecast various states of health and disease from sensor data. At UT Austin, he is a member of the DICE, SES, and bioECE tracks, the Wireless Networking and Communications Group (WNCG), and the iMAGiNE consortium. He is currently an editor on the ACM Proceedings on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies (PACM IMWUT) and a Steering Committee Chair of the ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp). Thomaz holds a bachelor's degree in Computer Science from UT Austin, a master's from MIT and a Ph.D. from Georgia Tech. Prior to his Ph.D., he held industry positions at Microsoft and France Telecom.