UROP Research Mentor Project Submission Portal: Submission #1309

Overall Research Project Description This research, conducted in the eHealth Laboratory, is led by Professor Dr. Zhe He. Specifically, we seek to study changes in blood test results in older adults that may be related to physiological and pathological conditions inherent to aging. Since many older adults have difficulty interpreting blood test results, the project aims to support the development of innovative and inclusive AI-powered tools to help them and their caregivers better understand these tests, thereby promoting their engagement, improving the quality of preventive and follow-up care, and enhancing treatment adherence. With an interdisciplinary team composed of experts in artificial intelligence, health science, and gerontology, our primary objectives are to conduct a literature review on fluctuations in blood test values in older adults, based on scientific studies involving a representative sample of the American older adult population. We will also create a database compiled from recent scientific publications, including, but not limited to reference values for blood tests in healthy adults and those observed in older adults, common causes of variations in these tests in older population (whether pathological or physiological), and characteristics of the studies, such as whether they were conducted with community-dwelling older adults, hospital patients, or residents of long-term care facilities. Research assistants will support the identification of relevant scientific articles for the scientific review and help organize and store these publications in a centralized database accessible to all researchers in the lab. Research areas include: Aging, Biology, Public Health, Biomedical and Health Informatics, and Clinical Research Informatics. We are also deeply engaged in advancing biomedical natural language processing, machine learning, and healthcare data analytics using a multidisciplinary approach.