Upcoming Webinar – Old School Meets New School: Voice-Based, AI-Enabled Cognitive Rehabilitation for Dementia Care

Zoom Registration: https://umass-amherst.zoom.us/meeting/register/o-oU8bqwR4GnY7D0cDLaeg Abstract: Cognitive rehabilitation therapy supports individuals living with mild cognitive impairment and early-stage dementia in maintaining and improving function in daily life. However, access remains limited due to constraints in the availability and scalability of trained therapists. Recent advances in artificial intelligence, combined with evolving reimbursement pathways for remote care in the United States, now make virtual delivery models increasingly viable, creating new opportunities to expand access to high-quality cognitive care. Moneta Health has developed a telephone-based cognitive rehabilitation platform that enables structured, personalized therapy sessions delivered remotely and overseen by licensed speech-language pathologists. The platform leverages AI-driven speech analysis and automated session orchestration to support consistent therapy delivery while preserving clinician oversight, enabling older adults to engage in care from their homes through a familiar and intuitive interface. This approach is…

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Upcoming Webinar – How to Develop and Test Mechanism-Driven, Technology-Enabled Interventions in Response to the Scientific Foci of ASU Roybal Center for Older Living Alone with Cognitive Decline

Zoom Registration: https://umass-amherst.zoom.us/meeting/register/r9F5BXB5QleCFE2zsRKEvg Abstract: Purpose: 1) Explain the scientific foci of ASU Roybal Center for Older Adults Living Alone with Cognitive Decline to delay the onset and progression of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementia (AD/ADRD), and 2) Guide investigators to develop strong research proposals, focusing on the significance of a proposed solution, mechanism-driven and technology-enabled interventions, and health disparity factors.  Rationale: Poor lifestyle behaviors such as physical inactivity, unhealthy diet, and stress contribute to up to 40-50% of AD/ADRD cases; however, few intervention successes have been translated into real-world impacts. Most interventions are not mechanism-driven, precise, accessible, cost-effective, and/or scalable, which could potentially be addressed by technology through integrating Artificial Intelligence, real-time analytics and feedback, enhancing user autonomy and person-centeredness, and personalizing intervention prescription and delivery. In addition, the population of older adults living alone…

Continue ReadingUpcoming Webinar – How to Develop and Test Mechanism-Driven, Technology-Enabled Interventions in Response to the Scientific Foci of ASU Roybal Center for Older Living Alone with Cognitive Decline

Past Webinar – Advancing Fair & Effective AI for Older Adults

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67St-zDEzjk Abstract: Artificial intelligence holds promise to transform care for older adults, yet today’s AI systems routinely underperform for this population due to poor data representation, limited validation, and weak alignment with lived experience. Drawing on a six-month collaboration between the SCAN Foundation, CHAI will be synthesizing evidence from literature review, expert interviews, and multi-stakeholder roundtables to surface why AI fails older adults—and what must change. They will outline practical pathways for building equitable AI, including multimodal data integration, standardized validation, local testing, and patient-centered deployment. The talk concludes with a roadmap for developing trustworthy AI that meaningfully improves outcomes for aging populations. Biography: Lucy Orr-Ewing, Head of Policy & Strategy, Coalition for Health AI (CHAI) Lucy Orr-Ewing leads Policy and Research for CHAI, where she leads policy engagement at both the state and federal…

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Past Webinar – Can You Walk Me Through It? Explainable SMS Phishing Detection using LLM-based Agents

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XST7eqXmFQQ Abstract: Phishing attacks pose a significant threat to users, especially older adults. Existing defenses mainly focus on phishing detection but often cannot explain to lay users why a message is malicious. In this talk, I will discuss how we use Large Language Models (LLMs) to detect SMS phishing while generating evidence-based explanations. The key challenge is that SMS is short, lacking the necessary context for security reasoning. We develop a prototype called SmishX that gathers external contexts to augment the chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning of LLMs and facilitate the explanation process. I will further discuss our user studies to evaluate the effectiveness and usability of SmishX. Finally, I will discuss the open challenges and opportunities of using AI to help older adults better protect themselves from cybersecurity threats in general. Biography: Gang Wang, PhD, Associate…

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Past Webinar – Progress in Personalizing Content and Dosing of a Physical Activity Promotion Intervention, David E. Conroy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzI9xjFMRsg Abstract: The Michigan Roybal Center aims to develop physical activity interventions for middle-age and older adults that engage validated mechanisms for adhering to behavior change following the end of active intervention support. This talk will review our ongoing work (a) to develop person-specific dosing algorithms to select the content and timing of text messages and (b) to engineer prompts for generative artificial intelligence systems to author message content that activates affective motivational processes to promote physical activity. The long-term objective of fusing these personalization strategies is to improve adherence to behavior change and reduce risk for Alzheimer's disease and related dementias. Biography: David Conroy, PhD, Professor and the Bickner Chair in Kinesiology at the University of Michigan Dr. Conroy is a Professor and the Bickner Chair in Kinesiology at the University of Michigan where he…

Continue ReadingPast Webinar – Progress in Personalizing Content and Dosing of a Physical Activity Promotion Intervention, David E. Conroy

Past Webinar – LLMs for Assistance in ADRD: From Word Retrieval to Caregiver Support, Archna Bhatia and Richard Curtis

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wLqw42_kPg Overview:  This webinar comprises two presentations by Archie Bhatia from the Institute for Human & Machine Cognition and from Richard Curtis from Ripple Care.  They each discuss the work from their MassAITC a2 Pilot awards using LLMs to help with word retrieval for older adults with ADRD and to support ADRD Caregivers. Abstracts: Integrating LLMs and Other AI Technologies in an Intelligent Cognitive Assistant for Word Retrieval Support for Older Adults with ADRD Occasional inability to retrieve words accompanies aging, even for healthy people, and especially for those with Alzheimer's Disease and Related Dementias (ADRD). This phenomenon tends to thrust people into social isolation, resulting in an increased rate of decline. In this webinar, we will discuss the development of an Intelligent Personalized Cognitive Assistant, MyWords!, an AI-enhanced application that provides real-time word retrieval…

Continue ReadingPast Webinar – LLMs for Assistance in ADRD: From Word Retrieval to Caregiver Support, Archna Bhatia and Richard Curtis