Mintz working to help home caregivers for dementia patients

Yonatan Mintz, an assistant professor of industrial and systems engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is part of two new efforts funded by the National Institutes of Health to use data science to aid caretakers of dementia patients in rural settings.

The three-year projects, with total funding of $2.5 million and $1.5 million, respectively, are led by Nicole Werner, a former UW-Madison faculty member now at Vanderbilt University, and California-based Whiplash Technology.

In the first, Mintz will use reinforcement learning to help deliver personalized recommendations for resources through an app called CareVirtue. In the second, he’ll help fine tune an AI agent that can chat with caregivers, answering questions while protecting data.