Everyday Patient-Care Technologies for Alzheimer’s Disease

By James Tung, Heather Snyder, Jesse Hoey, Alex Mihailidis, Maria Carrillo, and Jesus Favela

NOTE: This is an overview of the entire article, which appeared in the October-December 2013 issue of the IEEE Pervasive Computing magazine.
Click here to read the entire article.

The statistics are startling – more than 35 million people worldwide are living with Alzheimer’s disease or a related dementia, according to Alzheimer’s International. More troubling is the expectation that that number will likely double over the next 20 years. This article stresses the importance of developing new technologies to help alleviate Alzheimer’s effects on individuals and their families and to reduce mounting healthcare costs.

In 2003, the Alzheimer’s Association partnered with Intel to establish the Everyday Technologies for Alzheimer’s Care (ETAC) initiative. Since then, ETAC grants of up to US $200,000 have helped generate at least 30 related research projects internationally.

More recently, the Alzheimer’s Association and the International Society to Advance Alzheimer’s Research and Treatment (Istaart) collaborated to organize the first Technical and Dementia Symposium at the 2013 Alzheimer’s Association International Conference in Boston. This article presents several projects discussed at the symposium which addressed early detection and diagnosis (an ongoing problem), monitoring of changes in a patient’s daily activities outside the home, various treatments and intervention methods, and technologies to help patients complete daily living activities.

To learn about these new and exciting technology-based approaches to Alzheimer’s patient-care, see the full article.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS
For bios and photos of the authors, see the entire article.