Dementia Monitoring with Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Beginning dementia is a major cause for leaving the familiar home environment and moving into a retirement home. This means loss of independence for the individuals and leads to growing expenses for the health-care system. While many solutions for ambient assisted living (AAL) provide support for monitoring and enabling dementia patients to stay longer in the home environment, the actual use of AAL solutions lags behind expectation. A major challenge is to satisfy the information needs of different stakeholders in the dementia care process while paying attention to the privacy concerns at the same time. In this chapter, a concept is introduced to autonomously process and analyze collected data in the home environment. The concept is part of the “SAKI” project which is funded by the Federal German Government. By using data mining and artificial intelligence, the tremendous amount of data can be analyzed in-home and only sent outside when defined critical situations are detected. Therefore, existing AAL solutions are combined to detect significant patterns where external help or information is required. Three types of actors in the field of dementia care can profit from this development: The patient himself is provided with real-time feedback of his cognitive and behavioral performance. Family members are provided with summarized and abstracted information to monitor the patient’s well-being and their level of autonomy. Professional caregivers are provided with detailed information on daily activities and medical information, which can be integrated in the caregiver’s information technology system.