Transforming Senior Care

Finding innovative and comfortable ways to assist adults as they age has been a lifelong pursuit for Phil Gisi, ’82.

Gisi a co-founder and board member of Edgewood Real Estate Investment Trust and founder and CEO of Edgewood Healthcare, a vertically integrated senior housing and healthcare provider serving the Midwest.

Gisi also founded Aspire HealthTech Partners, a Grand Forks-based venture capital and private equity firm investing in early-stage healthcare technology businesses serving the senior population. “Many of our talented team members are UND graduates, but UND’s contribution goes much deeper, including entrepreneurial support and research,” Gisi said.

Aspire HealthTech invested in CarePredict, an AI-powered digital health platform for senior care. Gisi invited the company to open an office at the UND Center for Innovation, creating a connection with the BioInnovation Zone in the College of Engineering & Mines. CarePredict’s CEO agreed to fund UND internships focused on improving the company’s technology. 

During the 2023-24 school year, biomedical engineering students, including Mohamed Mahmoud and Collins Poku Obeng, worked on a CarePredict-sponsored project— a lightweight wristband that monitors ambient conditions and vital signs of wearers. 

The UND team built predictive and preventive machine learning models, which enable the device to track bathroom activities to detect unusual patterns that may be due to diseases like cognitive impairments and urinary tract infections.

Obeng said his decade-long experience as a field service engineer motivated him to pursue his degree. “I saw people waiting until they were very sick before seeking treatment and wondered why we wait for clients to turn into patients before we care for them,” Obeng said. He believes that “real health care” lies in preventative measures like their prototype.

This summer, he is working as a data science intern at CarePredict in Plantation, Florida.