PhD Dissertation Proposal by Barry Nuqoba | Towards Multidisciplinary Collaboration for Holistic Well-Being

Population aging is a global issue, including in Singapore. Along with workforce and healthcare issues, well-being is a significant issue to tackle. The increase in life expectancy will not become an absolute fortune if seniors have to live with poor well-being in their final years of life. The government has played its part by launching some programs, including Healthier SG. All community members, including researchers, must participate in enabling seniors to age in place in good shape. Multidisciplinary collaboration will leverage our ability to contribute more to seniors’ well-being.

In this dissertation proposal, we investigate multidisciplinary collaboration between computer science, healthcare, and social sciences. First, in alignment with the preventive stream of SHINEseniors, we utilize passive unobtrusive in-home sensors to detect negative symptoms (nocturia, poor sleep quality) and diseases (diabetes) based on daily behaviors derived from sensors. Also, we conduct correlation analysis to understand behavioral indicators of the symptoms or illnesses. However, as correlation does not imply causation, we cannot suggest an intervention to improve well-being based on correlation information. Second, the evolving causal discovery methods in computer science and the availability of holistic social science panel data about well-being indicators in the Singapore Life Panel (SLP) under ROSA offers a massive opportunity to increase the bar even more. Specifically, we explore the use of causal discovery for SLP to enable targeted, evidence-based interventions to improve well-being. The combination of preventive care and targeted, evidence-based interventions will bring our seniors closer to holistic well-being.

Barry Nuqoba is a Ph.D. candidate at the School of Computing and Information Systems, Singapore Management University, supervised by Professor NGO Chong Wah (Main Supervisor), Professor TAN Hwee-Pink, and Professor Paulin Tay STRAUGHAN (Co-Supervisors). His research interests focus on investigating the actual use of sensors and causal discovery in multidisciplinary collaboration for holistic well-being.