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Megan Huisingh-Scheetz, MD, MPH, AGSF, FGSA

Associate Professor
University of Chicago
Chicago, Illinois, United States

Megan Huisingh-Scheetz, MD MPH is a Geriatrician and clinician scientist who has focused her research on understanding the role of technology in advancing frailty assessment and management. Her work targets two areas of technology: accelerometry and voice-activated assistant devices. She has identified free-living accelerometry patterns predictive of frailty, physical function, disability, inflammation, social engagement and cognition using national epidemiologic datasets as well as her local, predominantly African-American, older adult dataset. She is a co-I of the NIA-funded National Social Life, Healthy and Aging Project and helps to oversee accelerometry data collection in the national cohort study. As a clinician, she helped to establish a frailty evaluation clinic at the University of Chicago in 2011 called the Successful Aging and Frailty Evaluation™ (SAFE) clinic. The clinic implements frailty assessment, management and monitoring within the context of a comprehensive geriatric assessment to all referred patients. This clinical experience informed her “in the trenches” perspective on the value of and remaining challenges to frailty measurement and management in practice. Her clinical work also inspired her to develop a new technology-based program called “EngAGE” that leverages a voice-activated assistant to deliver long-term exercise and socialization support to frail adults while empowering their caregivers, a project conducted with partnerships she established with NORC and Orbita, Inc. She is currently leading a randomized-controlled trial testing EngAGE’s efficacy on physical and social function among multimorbid, homebound, African-American older adults in Chicagoland. Her work greatly benefits from team science including collaborations with experts in computational data science, physical therapy, advanced statistical modeling, computer science, social science, medical and surgical subspecialties, basic science, kinesiology and business.

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