2019-2020 Alzheimer’s and Related Diseases Research Award Fund granted to Carilion Study

The Alzheimer's and Related Diseases Research Award Fund (ARDRAF) was established by the Virginia General Assembly in 1982 to stimulate innovative investigations into Alzheimer's disease and related disorders along a variety of avenues, including the causes, epidemiology, diagnosis, and treatment of the disorder; public policy and the financing of care; and the social and psychological impacts of the disease upon the individual, family, and community. The ARDRAF competition is administered by the Virginia Center on Aging in the College of Health Professions at Virginia Commonwealth University. The ARDRAF award was granted to the Carilion Clinic study team consisting of Azizza Bankole MD, Martha Anderson DNP, collaborating researcher John Lach PhD and the study coordinator Brook Mitchell. The study is founded on the basis that non-pharmacological interventions provided by caregivers of persons with dementia (PWD) can reduce the frequency and severity of dementia-related agitation, but the interventions must be timely and personalized to the PWD-caregiver’s environment. Prior work demonstrated the ability of the Behavioral and Environmental Sensing and Intervention (BESI) system to detect early-stage agitation and provide automated notifications to caregivers for timely intervention. The intervention recommendations piloted in BESI are based on assessment battery findings, are hand-selected by a clinician, delivered via the BESI tablet app in small batches, caregiver-evaluated for usefulness, and “manually” re-adjusted. The question remaining is whether clinician evaluation of the assessment tools
and hand-selection of targeted interventions can be automated to minimize or even eliminate the burden on clinical experts. Based on the categorization of interventions by potential agitation triggers and post-BESI interviews with caregivers and PWDs, the investigators aim to develop a higher level process of classifications and assessment to train the computer-generated intervention model and result in the Caregiver-Personalized Automated Non-Pharmacological Intervention System (CANIS) algorithm. By refining the trigger classifications and home context assessments, this team of computer and electrical engineers along with geriatric clinicians in partnership with dementia caregivers intend to build-out an intervention delivery mechanism to augment the BESI monitoring and notification system.