In a cozy apartment, an older woman sits in an armchair, raptly attuned to a scene unfolding on her virtual reality glasses. She chats amiably with a virtual tour guide who is leading her through the Baltimore Museum of Art. A Johns Hopkins medical student sits taking notes to help fine-tune this personalized, AI-generated tool, which is aimed at staving off loneliness.

Down the hallway, neurologist Ankur Butala and engineering professor Laureano Moro-Velazquez lead a man in his 70s through a series of reading and writing exercises on a digitized notepad. An array of sensors track the movement of the man’s eyes, the cadence of his voice and the movement of his hand. The researchers will continue to assess the man’s reading and handwriting every few months. Their overarching goal: to detect neurodegenerative disease like Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s in their earliest — and most treatable — stages.

These are just two of many efforts unfolding in a new hub for healthy aging research, which opened in July at the Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Campus under the umbrella of the Johns Hopkins Human Aging Project (HAP). The 10,000-square-foot center is bringing together faculty and students from medicine and engineering — as well as nursing, public health and business — with older adults and their caregivers to test technology-driven solutions to some of the biggest challenges older adults face.

These include social isolation, mobility issues and neurodegenerative decline, notes electrical and computer engineer Najim Dehak, co-director of the new space. “Our aim,” he says, “is to leverage technology to extend the time that older adults can remain living safely and independently at home.” Dehak has even coined a term for this new area of translational research, which is reflected in the hub’s name: Geriatrics Engineering@Johns Hopkins.

With its plentiful conference rooms, labs and offices, as well as a model apartment that simulates a realistic living space of an older adult, the hub notably provides a new home for the Johns Hopkins Artificial Intelligence & Technology Collaboratory for Aging Research (AITC). Established in 2021 with $20 million in funding from the National Institute on Aging, the AITC currently has 129 pilot projects — like the loneliness-combatting VR glasses — up and running. Some projects have spawned prototypes that are already being market tested.

The goal with AITC projects and other research unfolding in the new space is to move innovations as quickly as possible into affordable solutions that seniors can easily use, says Johns Hopkins geriatrician Peter Abadir, who co-directs the new facility.

“We aren’t just building gadgets. We’re creating scalable solutions to meet older adults where they are—in their homes, or senior centers or their doctor’s office,” Abadir says. “We’re bringing engineers from the Homewood campus together with clinicians in East Baltimore to work shoulder by shoulder, quite literally, to design and validate technology that will help older adults live independently for longer, and with dignity.”