GAINESVILLE, September 15 — The University of Florida has unveiled a federally funded project to turn the ordinary smartphone into a remote monitoring station for ageing research, with the aim of capturing the kind of health data that clinics routinely miss. The project, called G-CARE — Gerontology Centers united to Aid Remote Research in Elders — is backed by the National Institute on Aging, part of the National Institutes of Health.
It is led jointly by Sanjay Ranka, a professor in UF’s Department of Computer & Information Science & Engineering, and Todd Manini, a professor in the College of Medicine’s Department of Health Outcomes & Biomedical Informatics and acting director of the UF Institute on Aging.
What the platform is meant to do
Under the hood, G-CARE is a next-generation smartphone platform designed to let researchers study older adults remotely, continuously, and in the context of their everyday lives. It is intended to monitor mobility, cognition, medications, symptoms, daily activities and other health information, while supporting wearables, GPS and cognitive assessments. The guiding principle is straightforward: use technology to gather detailed wellness data in order to improve quality of life for elderly citizens and their caregivers.
Ranka’s interest is not purely academic. He was motivated partly by concern for his own ageing parents and by frustration with the medical technology he had seen in use.
“Health care should happen outside of the hospital,” he said. He recalled earlier generations of monitoring hardware with a researcher’s exasperation. “Years ago, we were looking at data from devices that were attached to patients’ hips,” Ranka said.
“Some of the devices would get lost, some would end up in the bathtub and get destroyed. As smartwatches came on the scene, we wondered if we could collect the same kind of data, not from the hip, but from the hand.
So, more data and more interactivity. Because you can use the watch to reach out to the patient and say, ‘Hey, are you okay?’ in case intervention is required.”
The measurement gap in ageing research
Manini frames the problem as one of coverage rather than capability. The fundamental challenge in ageing research and clinical care, he said, is that many of the outcomes that matter most — mobility, physical function, symptoms, and the ability to live independently — are usually not measured clinically at all, or are captured only during brief and infrequent visits. “We simply are not getting a holistic view of health in late life,” Manini said.
G-CARE is intended to address that gap by creating a reusable research infrastructure built on familiar technologies — smartphones and wearable sensors — that can repeatedly collect meaningful information remotely. The design pairs the ubiquitous smartphone as the data-processing hub with the smartwatch acting as a data-collection device.
The work is oriented around what UF’s Institute on Aging calls “the five Ms of geriatrics”: mobility, medication, mentation, multicomplexity, and what matters most.
What comes next
Ranka and his collaborators hope to build a scalable research infrastructure that can change how ageing is studied, helping researchers develop and evaluate ways to predict important health events — including falls, emergency department visits and hospitalisations — while reducing the burden of research participation for older adults. For Ranka, the appeal is applied. “I want to do theoretical research for practical applications,” he said.
“Most of my work today is very application-oriented, and hopefully to some extent it has the potential to have an impact on the real world.” The detail that matters, as ever, will be whether a phone in a pocket and a watch on a wrist can produce data reliable enough to act on. That is the question G-CARE has now been funded to answer.
