UMass Amherst and Mass General Brigham Awarded Nearly $24.5M for 5-year Continuation of MassAITC
Massachusetts AI and Technology Center for Connected Care in Aging & Alzheimer’s Disease looks ahead to five more years of advancing AI technology for elder care
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The University of Massachusetts Amherst and Mass General Brigham announced today a $24,499,836 competing renewal grant from the National Institute on Aging (NIA) for the Massachusetts AI and Technology Center for Connected Care in Aging & Alzheimer’s Disease (MassAITC). This award is a five-year continuation of previous NIA funding, totaling approximately $20 million from 2021 to 2026.
More than 90% of older Americans report that they would prefer to stay in their own homes as they age, but chronic illnesses including Alzheimer’s disease put aging at home out of reach without extensive support. MassAITC’s mission is to foster research and development of AI-enhanced technologies that support healthy aging in place for older adults and individuals with Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (AD/ADRD).
The new funding will enable the continuation and expansion of the center’s mission, said Benjamin Marlin, a professor in the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS). Marlin is co-director of the center with Deepak Ganesan, Manning CICS professor, and Sudeshna Das, associate professor at Harvard Medical School and in the Department of Neurology at Mass General Brigham.
“Through this renewal, MassAITC will expand its scope to include technologies that support healthy aging and the care of people living with ADRD in their place of choice, including both individual homes and care communities,” Marlin said. “MassAITC will continue to support cutting-edge research through access to state-of-the-art core facilities and resources at UMass Amherst and Mass General Brigham. We will also expand support for pilot projects across the country through the establishment of a national network of pilot partners and a mentoring network.”
Over the past five years, MassAITC has supported innovations focused on six technology domains—AI and large language models, wearable and remote sensing, virtual reality and robotics—applied to five critical health challenges: fall risk and physical function, cardiometabolic health, cognitive function, AD/ADRD early diagnosis and caregiver support. MassAITC has funded a total of 53 projects to date, the majority of which were industry-academic partnerships or industry-led projects.
The MassAITC research center, which is housed at UMass Amherst, is a collaboration between the commonwealth’s premier institutions of education and health, including Manning CICS, the Elaine Marieb College of Nursing at UMass Amherst and Mass General Brigham.
Several pilot project teams have accelerated their research and development using core facilities at UMass Amherst and through working with UMass Amherst faculty, including partnerships with the UMass Amherst Institute for Applied Life Sciences Sleep Monitoring Lab, mHealth Lab, and Gait and Mobility Core; the Riccio College of Engineering’s Human Performance Lab; and the UMass Amherst Center for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence’s dataCore group.
This support was “transformative” for product development, said Gregory Stock, CEO and founder of Socratic Sciences, which worked with MassAITC on Only Human, an AI-enhanced facilitation platform offering social and emotional support to family caregivers of individuals with dementia. “Their work was not only technically excellent but also commercially pragmatic, enabling us to achieve our project objectives in a way that positioned the technology for real-world viability,” Stock said.
“The MassAITC leadership team looks forward to continuing to work closely with the National Institute on Aging leadership team to ensure the success of the Artificial Intelligence and Technology Collaboratories for Aging Research (AITC) program, of which MassAITC is a part,” Marlin said.
“I am thrilled that MassAITC has been awarded support for another cycle, building on the strong foundation and successful pilot projects established in the first round,” Das said. “I look forward to co-directing MassAITC with Drs. Marlin and Ganesan at UMass Amherst and leading the Research Innovation Core with Dr. Steven Arnold. Together, we will help investigators develop, test, and translate AI-enabled technologies that can meaningfully improve the lives of older adults, people living with Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias, and their caregivers.”
On Oct. 19, MassAITC issued a call for proposals through the AITC Annual National Research Award Competition seeking pilot projects aligned with its mission of fostering research, development and validation of AI-enhanced technologies that support healthy aging in place of choice for older adults, individuals with Alzheimer’s disease and their caregivers. Submissions are welcome from industry researchers, academic-industry partnerships and academic teams pursuing commercialization or translation of their work. Letters of intent are due by Nov. 16, 2026; for more information, see the request for applications.
MassAITC is supported by the National Institute on Aging of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number P30AG073107. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.
This story was originally published by the UMass Amherst Office of News and Media Relations.
