CITRIS Distinguished Speaker Series: Eric Dishman

In the midst of disruptive demographic changes that will double the number of people over age 60 to more than 1.2 billion by 2025, we are faced with an enormous global challenge: how do we improve the quality of life for double or even triple the number of people in need while decreasing the costs of healthcare? The answer is most certainly not to continue the healthcare "business as usual" approach we take today which is premised upon reaction-to-crisis, hospital settings, and late-in-the-game intervention. It is imperative that we transform healthcare from reactive to proactive, from population-based to personal, from intervention to prevention, and from hospital to home.

Since 1999, Intel social scientists have been studying the needs of people across the continuum of care to figure out how technologies might be used to drive a more proactive paradigm. Starting in 2005, Intel launched its newest business, the Digital Health Group, to begin developing platforms for proactive healthcare. In this talk, Eric Dishman, General Manager for Intel's Health Research & Innovation Group (http://www.intel.com/healthcare/hri/), will give an overview of Intel's strategy and research to promote prevention, early detection, compliance, and family caregiving through disruptive technologies such as wireless sensor networks, Web 2.0 capabilities, cell phones, WiMax, behavioral analytic engines, and more. In particular, he will focus on Intel's worldwide efforts to accelerate R&D on independent living and chronic disease management technologies that will help older citizens to better care from themselves from wherever they call home. His talk will include Intel's policy efforts in CAST (www.agingtech.org) and the new TRIL Centre (www.trilcentre.org) in Ireland; several prototype technologies will be shown in the areas of Alzheimer's assistance, Parkinson's treatment, medication compliance, social health, and the prevention of cardiovascular disease.

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