Abstract-With larger numbers of older people living longer, an increasing proportion of the population will require a more supportive and responsive regional city environment. However, regional local governments have neither the resources nor the appropriate tools needed to understand and respond to the infrastructure needs of older persons. As mobile devices such as tablets and phones proliferate, there is an opportunity to use mobile apps to engage older people more effectively with their local government associations in planning the future of their regional city centres. In this paper we discuss the potential of this application for crowdsourcing older people's opinions as a form of community engagement. The application was developed in partnership with the Local Government Association and the partnership of the two regional local governments who participated in our pilot. We begin by describing the architecture of our platform, addressing choices regarding user interface design, modes and models for data capture, and standards guidelines. We then discuss methods we use for analyzing and visualizing the collected data to facilitate better decision making by governments. Lastly, we discuss the results of the field trials of our platform with mobile focus groups comprising senior citizens in two coastal regional cities in New South Wales, and interpret how our findings relate with the planning and development of these towns. Our work is the first step towards the use of mobile technologies to enable large scale data collection that can lead to smarter and more liveable cities for senior citizens.

In Parkinson's disease (PD) patients, dopamine replacement therapy requires days to reach maximal effects, and the return of symptoms without treatment is similarly delayed. We previously postulated that these phenomena are mediated by plasticity of coritcostriatal synapses. As dopamine depletion is expected to promote aberrant potentiation of the cortical inputs onto indirect pathway neurons, we reasoned that induction of LTD here could reduce motor deficits in a PD model. Optogenetic cortical stimulation combined with a D2 receptor agonist, quinpirole, induces robust optical LTD (oLTD) in brain slices from 6-OHDA lesioned mice. When lesioned mice were subjected to corticostriatal oLTD treatment over 5 days, motor performance was improved for >3 weeks. Consistent with LTD induction, oLTD-treated mice had reduced VGLUT1 expression in striatum and greater excitability of D2 neurons. These findings suggest that reversing aberrant corticostriatal synaptic plasticity in the indirect pathway may lead to persistent relief of PD motor symptoms.

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