Martin Sliwinski
Pennsylvania State University, PA·Psychology
Alzheimer's disease and related dementias begin changing the brain years or decades before diagnosis. Catching these early, subtle shifts in thinking could aid prevention, but traditional cognitive tests are too coarse to detect them.
- Fields
Psychology
Neuroscience
Public Health & Epidemiology
- Topics
Alzheimer's disease
dementia
cognitive aging
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Mar 2031
What they work on
- Co-design more accessible versions of nine M2C2 smartphone cognitive tasks with community partners and compare them with the originals through A/B testing of 11,200 TestMyBrain.org users and burst assessments in 200 Einstein Aging Study participants.
- Evaluate the M2C2 Platform's usability for researchers through alpha and beta testing of its web tools for study design, data download and analysis, using usability benchmarks to judge release readiness.
- Test how different high-frequency assessment schedules capture cognitive change and relate to Alzheimer's biomarkers and to daily factors such as social engagement, physical activity and stress.
- Spread the open-source platform through a network of four academic and technology providers and a long-term M2C2 Consortium of users.
More about the research
One alternative is to have people take very short tests many times on their own phones, which can reveal small changes over time. Both grants support building the Mobile Monitoring of Cognitive Change (M2C2) Platform, an open-source, mobile-first system for this kind of high-frequency cognitive assessment.
Why it matters
Phone-based cognitive tests that detect subtle early changes could help dementia researchers identify Alzheimer's risk sooner and run prevention trials more efficiently. More accessible task designs could include people with different language, perceptual and motor abilities. Open-source tools could serve researchers with limited technical or financial resources.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Matthew D Grilli
University of Arizona, AZ·Neuroscience
Test whether smartphone-tracked autobiographical thoughts in clinically normal older adults relate to plasma Alzheimer's biomarkers and to resting-state connectivity of the default network, brain regions targeted early in the disease.
Lauren Rutter
Indiana University, IN·Psychology·Early-career
Examine how cognitive performance, perceived stress and psychiatric symptoms relate across individuals and over time, in an existing sample from the Indiana Alzheimer's Disease Research Center.
Anna Kratz
University of Michigan, MI·Psychology·Early-career
Test whether smartphone-delivered ambulatory cognitive tests and real-time self-reports detect two-year changes in cognitive function in multiple sclerosis more sensitively than conventional clinic-based snapshot assessments.
The school
Pennsylvania State University: 60 labs on PI Pages, $1.3B a year on research, 743 research doctorates a year.
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