Social Support Aid For People With Dementia
Condition: Dementia; Memory Loss
MeSH terms: Dementia; Memory Disorders
Study type: Interventional
Phase: Phase 2

Summary: 
      The goal of this study is to determine the acceptability, utility, and preliminary
      effectiveness of a facial recognition technology for persons with memory concerns and their
      family care partners.
    

Detailed description: 
      This project develops a novel social support aid (SSA) to allow persons with memory concerns
      (PWMCs) to more fully engage in their social network and enhance their quality of life. The
      SSA will assist people in an early stage of dementia, e.g., Alzheimer's disease or related
      dementia, who desire social interaction, but struggle to remember names and relationships. It
      provides memory cuing by displaying the names and relationships of the people with whom PWMCs
      are engaged. The investigators anticipate that the SSA will offer robust support for care
      partners and PWMCs in various communities. The SSA is not intended to replace caregiver aids,
      but rather augment them to further improve quality of life. Millions of Americans have
      dementia, the loss of mental functions, e.g., thinking, memory, and reasoning, which
      interferes with their daily functioning. While some cases of dementia are caused by medical
      conditions that can be treated, most cannot be reversed. Hence, the focus switches from
      treatment to palliative care, i.e., developing a plan to make life easier and more
      comfortable for individuals with dementia and their caregivers. Assistive technologies to
      enhance living with dementia, let alone studies that evaluate their efficacy, are
      underdeveloped. The proposed project aims to begin filling this scientific and clinical gap
      by developing a social support aid and formally evaluating its utility via a sufficiently
      powered randomized controlled trial.

      This phase II Small Business Innovation Research project will continue work started in phase
      I and complete a product. The aim of this human subjects research protocol is to evaluate
      whether the SSA exerts positive benefits for PWMCs' social connections, communication, and
      quality of life via an embedded experimental mixed methods design that combines the
      collection and analysis of qualitative data within a traditional randomized controlled trial
      (RCT) design. The investigators hypothesize that the proposed SSA will exert positive
      benefits on the social connections, communication, and quality of life of people in early
      stage dementia.
    

Intervention name(s): Social Support Aid
Intervention type(s): Device
Intervention description(s): Please see earlier; the social support aid technology consists of a smartphone with a facial recognition software application and a smartwatch. Up to 1,000 individuals can be enrolled in the facial recognition application. Enrollment includes typing individuals names and relationships of the person with memory concern into the application and taking pictures of PWMC's faces at multiple angles. Once enrolled and in view of the smartphone's camera, the SSA's application recognizes the individual's face and alerts the smartwatch. The watch then vibrates and displays the individuals' name and relationship to the PWMC.
Allocation: Randomized
Intervention model: Parallel Assignment
Intervention model description: Individual with memory concerns and their family caregivers were randomly assigned to receive the facial recognition technology or usual care.
Masking: None (Open Label)
Primary purpose: Supportive Care
Keywords: Caregiving; Technology; Social support