Mobile Technologies May Help Researchers Crack the Mysteries of Aging

Pennsylvania State University Professor Martin Sliwinski and colleagues will use a National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant to gain more knowledge about how small changes in the brain can develop into neurological conditions later in life by developing new standardized mobile technologies for American scientists, reports EurekAlert . This work could yield new insights that inform prevention measures and enhance quality of life for older adults and their loved ones. "Using these new technologies, we'll be able to obtain high-precision data about the mental and cognitive function of research study participants in the context of their everyday lives," Sliwinski says. "This allows us to gather data as they go about their everyday lives, which goes beyond what we can already do in a lab." In one example, participants could open a smartphone app, input information about stress levels, and then play a brain game so researchers can measure their cognition and study how stress impacts brain function. The NIH grant will enable Sliwinski and his team to partner with the company Sage Bionetworks to construct the necessary infrastructure. "We'll be designing a suite of tools that are ready for scientists to begin using immediately in their research, with no programming or technical knowledge needed on their part," Sliwinski notes. "But it will also be a code base that can be built upon if a researcher needed to customize and tailor it to fit their work. We want other labs to be able to innovate it and make it their own."