Health Technologies in Health Care Settings: Towards Functional Biomarkers of Aging and Disease
Please join the Health Technology Education Program and Manuel Hernandez for this lecture, part of the Spring 2026 Health Tech Speaker Series. About the talk: Advances in health technologies offer an opportunity to revolutionize the healthcare industry.
In particular, widening gaps in access to health specialties, such as neurologists, gerontologists or movement disorder specialists, necessitate tools that can improve efficiency and bring healthcare to those in need.
Given the increased aging of the world's population, and increased prevalence of neurological disorders, the identification of functional biomarkers of aging and disease may provide significant utility for earlier identification of chronic neurodegenerative conditions or monitoring of disease progression.
This talk provides an introduction to challenges and opportunities in translating advances in health technologies in healthcare settings and provides examples of recent work and progress examining the use of wearable technology and machine learning and artificial intelligence to the monitoring of age-related changes and symptoms associated with neurological conditions, such as multiple sclerosis and Parkinson's disease.
About the speaker: Manuel Hernandez received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in 2012. He is a teaching associate professor in the Department of Biomedical and Translational Sciences at the at the Carle Illinois College of Medicine at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and affiliate faculty member in Bioengineering, the Beckman Institute, Health and Kinesiology and the Neuroscience program.
His fields of professional interest include aging, movement disorders and systems neuroscience.