Roschelle “Shelly” Fritz remembers it like it was yesterday. While working as an emergency department nurse in Boise, Idaho, a patient came in that would change the trajectory of her life. 

“Mr. Smith,” she calls him to protect his identity, arrived by ambulance. The 79-year-old was in and out of consciousness with extremely low blood sugar. A concerned neighbor had found him unconscious, slumped over in his recliner in his home — a Life Alert button hanging around his neck. 

“When I asked him, ‘Mr. Smith, you weren't feeling good. Why didn't you push your Life Alert button?’ And he said, ‘What? What button?’ – He didn't even remember it was around his neck,” she recalled. “That was the straw that broke the camel's back for me.”

Fritz knew technology was evolving rapidly and being used effectively in other fields like transportation and banking. She wanted to harness it in nursing care to improve patients’ lives. 

She embarked upon a Doctor of Philosophy in Nursing Science Degree from Washington State University, where she paired up with a computer scientist in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). They started designing a smart home hoping to create and train an algorithm to recognize clinically relevant behavior changes occurring at home.

Fritz received a $14,000 seed grant from UC Davis Global Affairs, which supports work that is fostering collaborations to advance groundbreaking discovery with global partners. 

Read the full article on the UC Davis Health website.