RADAR-AD

IMI’s RADAR-AD project is experimenting with different devices and software to track functional and cognitive decline in Alzheimer’s. ### Researchers from the project told IMI about their achievements so far and their plans for the next steps.

For example, the team is using sensors to measure how well people walk while also counting backwards from 100 to 0. For people with dementia, this is tricky. The team has refined the tests and is now bringing on board more people to expand the dataset they already have so that they can look for causal links between disease and altered walking patterns.

Other tests being assessed by RADAR-AD ask participants to play ‘hide and seek’, or mimic the experience of using an ATM to withdraw cash. Crucially, the team is linking data from some of these tests with data from ADNI, an initiative in which researchers collect data from MRI and PET images, genetics, cognitive tests, CSF and blood biomarkers to make predictions about the disease.

‘Our analysis showed that digital cognitive domains and digital task scores measured via the Altoida app offer a higher accuracy and sensitivity for diagnosing the disease at an early stage than questionnaire-based tests,’ said Meemansa Sood, of the Fraunhofer Institute for Algorithms and Scientific Computing (SCAI).

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Approximately 50 million people worldwide live with dementia, a figure the World Health Organization predicts will triple to 152 million by 2050. By 2030, the global cost of dementia could reach more than USD 2 trillion. To improve the lives of those patients and reduce the associated costs, IMI’s RADAR-AD project is working on using detailed information about the health of each patient to transition from a ‘diagnose and treat’ to a ‘predict and pre-empt’ model of care.###

RADAR-AD is combining mobile and smart home devices with data analytics technologies to provide enhanced care and remote health monitoring for patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) at all stages of disease progression.

‘RADAR-AD gives patients the opportunity to be better informed about their own health status and to use this information to self-manage the disease. This will ultimately help personalise care for each patient and allow them to live independently for longer,’ says project coordinator Dag Årsland at King's College London. ‘In parallel, we anticipate that the platform will improve our understanding of Alzheimer’s disease subtypes and progression, supporting the development of new and more effective treatments.’

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