Event Time: 9:00 -
Event Location: OHSU's Mac Hall Marquam Room
Agenda
9:00—9:30 Meet and greet with coffee and pastries
9:30 – 10:10 Fay Horak, PhD, Director of the Balance Disorders Laboratory at OHSU
Developing a New Clinical Test of Mobility for the Elderly
We are currently translating our many years of research on neural control of balance into a new, instrumented test of balance and gait that could be used for clinical trials and for clinicians. Current clinical tests of balance and gait are insensitive, biased, and/or time consuming. Using wireless, wearable sensors, we are testing the feasibility, reliability, validity and responsiveness of a new system for quantifying gait and balance control and fall risk. We are starting testing this system for patients with Parkinson’s disease because they fall more than patients with any other neurological disease but hope it will be useful for any older person with balance or gait problems.
10:10-10:25 Break
10:25-11:00 Izhak Shafran, PhD, Assistant Professor at The Center for Spoken Language Understanding at OHSU and recipient of a 2008 Roybal Center Pilot Award
Language as a Window into Social Engagement
Health, quality of life and treatment outcomes in older adults have been shown to be influenced by their level of social engagement in personal relationships and activities — both positive or negative — with family members, peers, community members, local institutions, and, at the broadest level, society. In this talk, we will describe how language is a window into human social behavior and how everyday telephone conversations can be automatically analyzed with adequate privacy protection to extract information relevant to social engagement. One important dimension of this information is affect or emotion displayed by the speaker. Before machines can recognize affect from utterance spoken by a person, they need examples of how that person expresses emotions. We will describe our work so far on creating a standard set of stimuli to elicit emotions and a user friendly web-based administration of data collection.
11:00-noon Discussion
Noon-1 pm Networking lunch