Personalising Cognitive Intervention for Dementia via Intelligent Virtual Advisors
Health informatics tools for the assessment and rehabilitation of dementias have grown steeply over the last decade both in number and robustness. Particular emphasis has been put on the development of virtual reality (VR) applications due to their scope for patient immersion in naturalistic environments. However, available systems still face important challenges. They still lack the desire ecological validity and flexibility needed to achieve patient adherence to treatment and sustained improvements post-intervention. To achieve ecological validity, such systems should be meaningful to the individual, that is, they should follow a naturalistic approach through which cognitive abilities can be enhanced in contexts and with tasks familiar to the affected person. The flexibility component should allow tailoring the demands of the intervention plan in an intelligent and theory-driven manner reducing the need for therapist-centred interventions and consequently health care costs. This project tackles these challenges by merging VR interactive systems and artificial intelligence (AI). It pursues the following aims:
- it will operate in a theory-driven manner
- it will enhance cognition by linking, in a meaningful way, virtual and real experiences in daily living settings
- it will monitor the physical impact of cognitive enhancement
- it will integrate different sources of information to tailor advice that highlights the links across virtual and real environments (intelligent advisor) and to generate digital case notes which will be submitted to the health care team via telecare platforms
A new health informatics framework to investigate the cognitive and physiological underpinnings of impairments in daily living functions in ageing and dementia
This project investigates the neurocognitive correlates of functional impairments in elderly people with dementia or at risk of dementia (i.e., cognitively impaired). It focuses on common activities of everyday life such as domestic errands and driving. Performance on these activities is assessed within virtual and real environments. Moreover, we simultaneously collect physiological activity using portable EEG systems. This multimodal approach informs about (1) the cognitive correlates of functional impairments, (2) the pathophysiology of such a functional decline, (3) and the validity of virtual reality tools to assess and modify the course of functional loss in the continuum from normal ageing to dementia.