The collective leadership team at the Western Kentucky University Innovation Campus is always up for beginning something new.
Recently, WKU announced that Jana Michalik has been named as its inaugural WKU Innovation Campus Scholar, per a news release.
Michalik is a doctoral candidate pursuing a degree at the University of Kentucky College of Education. She will work both remotely and in-person to help conduct pilot research that will study the effects of a program developed at WKU by the name of Bingocize — particularly how willing older adults to use technology to access health information.
Bingocize is the brainchild of Jason Crandall, a professor of exercise science at WKU who also serves as the co-director of the WKU Center for Applied Science in Health and Aging (CASHA). Its core mission is to present exercise and health education to older adults in a group-based setting through a platform that is built around the game of Bingo — and delivered live by an instructor, either face-to-face or virtually.
Since its formation, Bingocize has since been spun off into its own company, one that I first heard of back in July when I visited Bowling Green for a cover story about the growing tech scene both at WKU and in the city in general.
Michalik will be working with Crandall as well as Mark Schafer, an associate professor of exercise at WKU who also is a part of the CASHA team.
“As the WKU Innovation Campus Scholar, I am thrilled about the opportunity to further expand Bingocize’s impact by integrating health-related technology education,” Michalik said in the release. “This pivotal enhancement will not only continue to improve health outcomes but also help bridge the digital divide, empowering older adults to confidently utilize health technology.”
It should be noted that Michalik is a former graduate student of Crandall’s in the WKU masters program in kinesiology.
“As we carried out our delivery of Bingocize using our online platform, we saw anecdotal evidence that it is impacting older adults’ willingness to use technology in general,” Crandall added, per the release. “However, we have never done any formal data collection around that aspect of our work. We are very excited by Jana’s planned research on how using our platform impacts attitude and confidence toward digital technologies among older adults.”
According to the release, the WKU Innovation Campus Scholar designation has been created “to acknowledge researchers significantly engaged in doctoral, postdoctoral, or other significant research work at the WKU Innovation Campus while working primarily for another academic institution.”
“At the WKU Innovation Campus, we are focused on applied research work that focuses on piloting new technologies and methods in real-world settings, scaling those research activities, and collecting evidence to guide that scale and prove efficacy,” said Buddy Steen, CEO of the WKU Innovation Campus. “We seek to attract those doing cutting-edge research to come to our region to conduct their work. In the process, we want to attract research activity that benefits WKU, businesses in our region, and communities within and beyond our region.”
Steen, who was named one of our 2023 KY Inno Fire award winners under the category of “Ecosystem Builders,” has been leading the charge to have several high-tech startups establish a significant presence at the innovation campus since last summer, including beingAI, MyXR Inc. and Lunae (one of our 2024 Startups to Watch).
