Coming soon: multi-center data on social engagement among Seniors - opportunities for modeling wellness

11:45am brown bag lunch and lecturefruit and cookies servedJohn Robinson MD, PhD is the CEO of Wellzesta, a startup in Chapel Hill that is developing a mobile Wellness (mWellness) platform for Seniors (persons age 65+). The software is a first-of-its-kind Electronic Wellness Record (EWR) system that stores structured data on participation in wellness events. The mWellness platform emphasizes social engagement, which is regarded as a key ingredient of ¿successful aging.¿ The EWR should provide major opportunities in wellness data analytics, including the ability to quantify social connectedness/social engagement in the elderly. Our next step is to go beyond summary statistics and to develop models of social functioning and machine learning algorithms to inform the models. Models of wellness are essential to evaluating interventions that seek to improve human health.