We are delighted to announce that Prof. Guoliang Xing has received HK$39.17 million for his five-year project “Foundation Models-Empowered Ambient Intelligence Systems for Early Diagnosis, Personalised Intervention, and Complex Cross-Disease Interplay Analysis of Aging-Related Degenerative Diseases”.

This project proposes Koala, the first ambient intelligence system that leverages Foundation Models (FM), the first general AI technology, to provide non-invasive, personalized diagnosis, intervention, and cross-disease interplay analysis for aging-related degenerative diseases, including both dementia and sarcopenia.

Koala will be validated through a large-scale comprehensive clinical trial that consists of deployments of multi-modal KoalaPortal systems as well as wearable devices. 1,000 subjects with various degrees of mobility and cognition impairments will be recruited from the out-patient clinic of three regional hospitals in Hong Kong, making it the largest cross-disease cohort study for both dementia and sarcopenia. This study will not only lead to holistic health solutions ranging from consultation, early diagnosis to intervention, but also have important implications to elucidate the synergistic evolvement of the pathological pathways between sarcopenia and dementia in a personalized context, and thereby enhance the diagnostic and therapeutic pursuits for both conditions.

Prof. Xing’s project is one of the six research projects awarded the Strategic Topics Grants (STG) for 2024/25.