Grant aims to connect home caregivers with outside experts

Kristine Williams, professor in gerontological nursing, has been awarded a grant that will help her test interventions to improve care for older adults by using technology to support family caregivers of persons with dementia.

The four-year grant from the National Institutes of Health's National Institution of Nursing Research will fund her project titled “Supporting Family Caregivers with Technology for Dementia Home Care (FamTechCare).”

Williams and her team will be testing a new tele-health intervention that uses in-home monitoring to link family caregivers to experts for guidance in managing challenging care situations to support continued care for the person with dementia at home while reducing caregiver stress and negative outcomes.

The grant, awarded last month, will help pay for technology and equipment needs as well as the staff who are needed to review video recordings submitted by families and provide guidance on how to improve the care they provide at home.

The team plans to enroll 88 families who are caring for a loved one with dementia at home. They will be recruiting participants from the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, and a second site will conduct the study at the University of Kansas Medical Center in Kansas City.

Data collected from the first group of participating families is expected to be available in about a year.

What do pigeons have to do with it?

DeLTA Center members Bob McMurray (Principal Investigator), Ed Wasserman, and Karla McGregor were recently informed of their successful submission of an interdisciplinary grant proposal to be funded by the Office of the Vice President for Research and Economic Development. Their project, investigating animal learning and human word learning, ties together previous research in Psychology and in Communication Sciences and Disorders.

Learning the words of one’s language is an immense task. Children must acquire between 30,000 and 60,000 words by adulthood, and adults continue to learn new words across the life span. However, not all individuals accomplish this task easily; as many as 10 percent of people are diagnosed with Language Learning Disabilities (LLD). LLD is a particularly important health issue, as it affects at least 10 percent of the population (far more than just about any other developmental disorder) and is associated with academic difficulties and poor career outcomes.

Can how pigeons learn teach us anything about the complex mechanism of how humans learn words? Wasserman and McMurray think so. They recently developed an animal model, training pigeons to categorize 128 photos into 16 common categories (cars, babies, etc.) Their work revealed a strikingly counterintuitive finding: namely, that the process of pruning associations between a category and incorrect responses may be more important than building associations between a category and its response. McMurray uses the term “prune” as a vivid metaphor but one that conveys a more graded sense in which spurious connections are slowly and gradually reduced, not irrevocably eliminated in one step.

This project will continue to develop their pigeon model to confirm the role of pruning. Parallel experiments with both typically developing young adults and young adults with LLD will explore the implications of this animal model for humans and determine their relevance to language impairment.

UI Libraries receives $300,000 NEH grant to conserve, digitize Vaudeville collection

A $300,000 grant from the National Endowment for Humanities will support the University of Iowa Libraries ability to offer both access to and preservation of a valuable collection of primary source material about American entertainment history.

The grant provides funding for UI Libraries Special Collections, preservation, and digital research and publishing staff to conserve and digitize 150 oversize scrapbooks in the Keith/Albee Vaudeville Theater Collection, one of the most important and comprehensive vaudeville archives in the country.

“The Keith/Albee Collection is one of our most frequently requested collections, but it has become increasingly difficult to allow access due to the deteriorating condition of the materials,” says Greg Prickman, head of Special Collections. “The only way to find information in the volumes has been to page through them, which has weakened the pages. We will now be able to properly conserve the originals, while greatly expanding access to the information they contain.”

Documenting the activity of a prominent vaudeville theater company through more than 40 years of business, the collection is rich not only in newspaper clippings and other publicity, but in managers’ reports and financial records as well. The collection’s focus on the business of vaudeville provides an understanding of the industrial evolution of a major form of popular entertainment, allowing researchers to track the conditions that contributed to the decline of live entertainment and the rise of film—currently a field of intense scholarly interest.

With the help of the UI Libraries crowdsourcing transcription initiative, DIY History, the Keith/Albee scrapbooks will be transformed, with assistance from any interested members of the public, from 150 physical volumes without an index to 150 digital objects that are full-text searchable.

This project will be completed by Spring 2017.

Editor's Note: "Gifts and Grants" is a roundup of research grants and other funding obtained by University of Iowa faculty, staff, and students in support of work across disciplines—from the sciences to the arts and humanities—that will be published regularly in Iowa Now.