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Steps to safety: Muhlenberg Township native William Kearns is part of a research project that aims to predict when the elderly are prone to falls as well as other medical issues.
Jan 12, 2010 (Reading Eagle - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) --
IN THE early 1980s, to escape the intense pressures of graduate studies, William Kearns decided to build a submarine by himself.
Granted, it was a model submarine, maybe 4- to-5-feet-long.
But it could fire two torpedoes and four missiles, and with its rotating propellers moved speedily enough in a pond to intimidate and ultimately collide with fi sh.
"It must have been an antistress response (to build the submarine)," he said. "I was enrolled in a psychology program where 12 students were admitted and nine dropped out."
But boy-oh-boy, this warlike submarine was apparently therapeutic.
It had a healthy function as a creative, emotional release for the individual.
An entertaining video of the submarine, with missiles arcing through the air, got 120,000 hits on YouTube last year.
"I always wonder if I'm going to get a visit from Homeland Security for something like this," said a chuckling Kearns, 55.
An assistant psychology professor at the University of South Florida, Tampa, William was home for a holiday visit in December with his 89-year-old father, Robert, Muhlenberg Township, a widower, retired salesman for Carpenter Technology and still avid woodworker with his own shop.
William is the youngest of Robert's three children.
Father and son remain close.
They stimulate and learn from one another.
"Bill was always into making gadgets and metalworking," said his dad. "But then we all come from a family of builders and inventor types."
Bob said he had one grandfather who made buggies and another grandfather, a country doctor, in State College who drove them. Buggy-building and doctoring, a perfect combination of the practical and humane.
His father, Charles Kearns, also manufactured cars and fi retrucks.
Again, Charles served people who needed transportation, not to mention public service workers dedicated to aid those in fi re emergencies.
In a roundabout way, it's probably important to know all this about the nature of William and his family.
To some extent, it adds some insight into the academic pursuits of this psychology professor, a 1972 graduate of Muhlenberg High School, recently awarded a $299,472 research grant for a twoyear research project called "Evaluation and Integration of an Automatic Fall Prediction System."
What such a complicated name amounts to is creatively combining psychological research with cutting-edge technology (transponder tags worn by individuals on their wrists and sensors mounted in rooms -- a system almost like airplane radar) to monitor the elderly in assisted-living facilities. The hope is to predict whether they are prone to falling or if they may be showing subtle signs of complications with medications or even the early onset of dementia.
"Aimless wandering by seniors is often associated with falling," William said. "A total of $19 billion a year is spent in the U.S. in medical care related to those suff ering injuries from falling,"
For the elderly, it is often the first misstep in a tragedy that leads to further debilitation.
When it comes to dementia, costs for a loved one's nursing home care can run $60,000 a year, he said, adding up to more than one-third of a million dollars over the course of six or seven years.
"Through our research, we want to gather enough information to be able to predict when wandering may lead to falling and when dementia is occurring so we can intervene with the earliest and most effective treatment, medications and safety measures," William said.
William, conducting his research with James L. Fozard, an adjunct professor in the School of Aging Studies, said the grant was given by the state's Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality through the Department of Aging and Mental Health Disparities.
It is the department's mission to address mental health and support-system needs of older adults and behavioral health disparities in Florida and throughout the nation, he said.
William's interest in the elderly was spurred by seeing a beloved aunt struggle with progressive dementia over a period of eight years in the 1990s.
"This was a lovely and extremely intelligent woman who served on boards of directors and was being reduced to a state of idiocy," he said. "That left a mark on me -- watching her struggle and my uncle's efforts to care for her.
"You want to be able to intervene very early in these cases. You're always looking at behavior that might indicate a problem. Once a person is no longer able to balance a checkbook, the skill is gone. You're not going to to get it back. The damage is done."
To work toward having the elderly live safely without falling or wandering into dangerous situations if dementia takes hold, William is banking on his research to help lead the way in giving new answers to old problems.
He also feels it's important for seniors to retain a healthy independence for as long as possible.
He looks at his father, living in his own home, carefully climbing steps, working in his wood shop, as a natural example of what a rewarding old-age can be.
And Robert, by the way, ready to embrace his ninth decade, is just on the cusp of learning to communicate with his son by computer -- by writing and video -- in faraway Florida.
Contact Bruce R. Posten: 610-371-5059 or bposten@readingeagle.com.
To see more of the Reading Eagle, or to subscribe, go to
http://www.readingeagle.com. Copyright (c) 2010, Reading Eagle, Pa. Distributed
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