Active living for Alzheimer patients

The number of people with dementia will grow rapidly in the next decades. People with dementia and their informal carers have special needs in order to live a dignified and happy life. Because of their cognitive and physical challenges it becomes increasingly difficult for them to direct their own daily activities. Choices are being made for them, in their best interest and to keep them safe. Agendas of partners and informal carers are dictated by the schedule of the person they care for. In most European countries the care facilities will soon be having difficulties in finding sufficient staff members to deliver the care required by people with dementia. ICT has been used only moderately so far to support patients and their carers and even then it is used mostly as a safety providing and monitoring solution.

What people with dementia really need from ICT is help in regaining control over their life and choices. To help them keep the cognitive and physical functions at the highest achievable level and even restore some of the lost cognitive skills. First ICT should support them in making choices for their day activities. It should preserve and even restore their cognitive functions by stimulating important parts of the brain. Then ICT should recognise and identify changes in their behaviour patterns that would indicate an improvement or relapse of their condition, so early intervention can prevent unnecessary loss of cognitive functions. Of course during all this ICT can perform the classical function of keeping people safe in their environment. And it should provide all these functions in peoples own homes as well as in care facilities.

The need for telecare and home automation to enable elderly people to live independently for a longer time has been shown in several studies and is well represented in earlier AAL calls. It has been used on very small scale for people with dementia. We now know it can monitor people’s movements but we only use that knowledge to close areas or doors where they’re not supposed to go.

We are developing a comprehensive platform of tools to enable people with dementia to interact with their environment, make their own choices, stay active and work on their cognitive and physical health in their own home. Using state of the art scientific knowledge we can audio-visually stimulate parts of the brain to reactivate them and we can detect early signs of change in their condition. We want to feed back the information about their daily choices and their progress into the organisers of healthcare workers so they will only have to support and assist the needs that haven’t or can’t be met by the person himself.

The system is being designed from a person’s point of view. It will operate in private homes as well as in residential care because it will be designed around a person with dementia and not around a particular care setting. Representatives from Alzheimer Netherlands will guard the users’ perspective in the project, as well as the Universities of Delft and Amsterdam who will support the interaction design and brain stimulation. The University of Mondragon in Spain will lead the pattern recognition and monitoring of the movements of people dementia. The different techniques will be made ready for prototype testing and it will be piloted in different care settings in the Netherlands and Spain. Then all the technology will be integrated into one wireless platform and tested for use in private homes and care facilities in different countries and settings. The market for this technology is substantial, promising great cost saving benefits for health insurance companies, improved quality of life for patients, reducing workload for carers and adding value to technology for ambient assisted living.

The success criteria for the project phase are:

• To demonstrate that people with dementia can make daily choices in their activity program by using a ICT tool that provides them with a menu to choose from.
• To demonstrate that people with dementia become more active after being exposed to audiovisual stimulation of mirrorneurons in the brain.
• To demonstrate that people with dementia can be guided towards activities they have chosen by using ICT for intuitive guiding with lights, projection of images or colour.
• To demonstrate that giving them feedback through ICT about their progress motivates them to stay active.
• To demonstrate that ICT can be a tool for informal carers to support their patient/family member in staying in control of their life.
• To demonstrate that (changes in) symptoms of demential behaviour in movements of people can be assessed by ICT and form a basis for early intervention.
• To demonstrate that people with dementia and their carers experience an improved quality of life when using our ICT solutions.
• To demonstrate that people with dementia receiving the ICT support from this project show improvement in cognitive skills or at least show less deterioration in the development of their dementia than a control group.
• To demonstrate that people with dementia using our ICT solutions will use less medication for controlling restlessness and/or anxiety than patients in a control group.
• To demonstrate that workers in health care experience a higher work satisfaction when using our ICT solutions to communicate and work with patients and informal carers.
• To assess that the perspective cost/benefit ratio of the foreseen industrial solutions are in line with the expectation of the different class of users/customers