In the next 20 years, the number of Americans aged 65 or older is expected to top 71 million, more than double what the senior population was in 2000. Here in South Carolina, according to U.S. Census estimates, senior citizens made up 13.3 percent of the state’s population in 2008, roughly half a percentage point higher than the national average.

And as this population ages, it won’t only be seniors facing new challenges and requiring new products and services. As the baby boomers live longer — and reside in the home and in the community longer — caregivers will also find themselves increasingly in need of support systems.

Enter the research and innovation effort SeniorSMART, a collaborative program designed to improve the lives of older adults and caregivers, as well as create jobs in the fields of social work and gerontology. The effort — part of the South Carolina Centers of Economic Excellence (CoEE) endowed chairs program — is a partnership among the University of South Carolina, Clemson University, Palmetto Health and the Greenville Hospital System University Medical Center.

SeniorSMART focuses on three critical areas of gerontology research: maintenance of brain health (SmartBRAIN); improved driving safety (SmartWHEELS); and independence in the home (SmartHOME).

To help coordinate seniorSMART’s various programs and secure grant funding, on June 2 the program announced the recruitment of Sue Levkoff, an internationally renowned researcher in geriatrics with an extensive background in social work and women’s health. Levkoff will serve as the endowed chair in community and social support for SmartHOME; endowed chairs in SmartBRAIN and SmartDRIVE have yet to be announced.  

A native of Charleston, Levkoff comes to Columbia from Cambridge, Mass., where she was most recently an associate professor in the Harvard Medical School’s Department of Psychiatry with multiple secondary appointments. At USC, she will teach graduate courses in the College of Social Work, focusing largely on ethnicity and aging, and will advise doctoral candidates. She will also open a Columbia branch of her Cambridge-based health technologies company, Environment and Health.

Levkoff says she has had multiple offers from other universities during the past 30 years, but the chance to coordinate research projects in several overlapping areas —and to bridge the gaps between technological innovation and social application —finally attracted her to USC.

“This was the first offer that excited me to the point that I said, ‘This is truly a unique opportunity,’” Levkoff says. “The whole purpose of this is for me to collaborate, and to collaborate not only with other disciplines but to collaborate with disciplines that I never would have imagined being able to collaborate with. That’s the beauty of this ...There are so many opportunities for cross-fertilization.”

Among other projects, Levkoff will be assisting seniorSMART director Paul Eleazer and USC researchers Victor Hirth and Debra Krotish with the testing and implementation of remote monitoring systems for the home, including one designed to minimize in-home falls and shorten response times after a fall has occurred. She is also helping to secure grants for a program at Clemson to adapt a driving simulator into a rehabilitation tool for stroke victims or people with traumatic brain injuries.

In addition to her role as a coordinator, Levkoff wants to make sure that engineers and researchers take into account the requirements of the people who will ultimately use the products they develop.

“I’m here to ensure that the end-user is included upfront,” she says. “Otherwise you’re going to produce something that isn’t of any relevance to people in need.”

Levkoff also stresses that technology doesn’t always mean complicated new hardware innovations. “The focus [of seniorSMART] is on technologies,” says Levkoff, “but there are different kinds of technologies.”

As an example, she cites the value of online support communities. An expert in the area of dementia management, she is already designing one online support community for caregivers of dementia patients, who she says can easily become isolated. She has also recently procured a grant to start an online community for the promotion of AIDS awareness among senior women, a group which she says is among those most at-risk when it comes to new-onset HIV cases.

“Women of this generation — which is my generation — they think condoms are for birth control,” Levkoff says. “And so people get divorced or their husbands die … and [sometimes] they don’t even know to use a condom.”

Having begun her career as a social worker, Levkoff emphasizes the role of the community in any new development and says she is even considering doing a radio call-in show to find out what sort of health technology and support programs seniors and senior caregivers in the Midlands need most.

“I really want to take this from smart home to smart community,” Levkoff explains. “Your home is situated in a community. One of the things that I really want to do is to see how we can involve the diverse community support systems that exist in Columbia and the surrounding areas — to not just focus on one system alone.” 


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