Unmet Need
Alzheimer's disease is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder of the central nervous system that leads to mental deterioration and eventually death. Currently, in the United States, there are more than 6 million people living with Alzheimer’s. Often, even with Alzheimer’s patients in severe cognitive decline, patients will experience rare, unpredictable, yet precious episodes of lucidity caused by familiar context triggers. These triggers can potentially be utilized in behavioral interventions to increase the frequency, duration, and strength of lucid intervals and improve cognition. However, these intervals have historically been caregiver anecdotes that have no impact on diagnosis or treatment, primarily due to the challenges in measuring lucid intervals and correlating them with external triggers, especially when they occur often at home and not in the doctor’s office. Thus, there is a need for a method of tracking and correlating lucid intervals with context triggers in order to induce moments of lucidity to improve the quality of life of patients and their caregivers.
Technology Overview
Johns Hopkins researchers have developed a diagnostic app and ecosystem for tracking lucid intervals of Alzheimer’s patients. It incorporates memory games that quantify a patient’s episodic, spatial, working, and long-term memory and can also integrate with commercially available health sensors to monitor other variables such as sleep cycle, heart rate and breathing rate. It also allows caregivers to use the built-in microphone and camera to record patients when they are lucid, allowing for the correlation of external triggers with episodes of lucidity. With this data, they propose to use deep learning to identify factors that drive cognitive fluctuations, taking advantage of individualized datasets to predict triggers for moments of lucidity. Furthermore, with known triggers of lucidity, the inventors propose to re-create the triggers using virtual reality to induce lucid episodes. Ultimately, this invention has the potential to improve the quality of life of Alzheimer’s patients by enabling clinicians to determine lucidity triggers and incorporate them into virtual reality based behavioral interventions to improve patients’ cognition.
Stage of Development
A prototype of the app and ecosystem have been developed and a pilot study of the app is planned. The deep learning and immersive virtual reality components are under development.
Patent
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Publication
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