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The assessment of dementia risk factors in-home telemonitoring by the SmartMe&You-TELEMAIA platform

Visualisation of the SmartMe&You-TELEMAIA platform

eBRAIN-Health WP7 exploits an AI-based digital solution for the home telemonitoring of dementia risk factors (sedentariness, chronic cardiac stress, and poor sleep quality) to map them to commercial smartwatches and guide their personalized mitigation with interventions, including cognitive training by serious video games used at home.

The SmartMe&You-TELEMAIA platform

The cloud-based SmartMe&You-TELEMAIA platform has been developed by the research group of Prof. Claudio Babiloni at the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology “Vittorio Erspamer,” at Sapienza University of Rome (Rome, Italy), in cooperation with smart companies for digital innovation, such as Sentech Srl and Sogetel Srl. 

Specifically, the SmartMe&You-TELEMAIA platform collects, stores, visualises, and analyses data on dementia risk factors derived from clinical and instrumental data, using machine-learning tools on the Consortium GARR cloud. Data for this platform are collected from older adults with intact cognition and from patients with cognitive decline due to neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Lewy body, and other diseases, through home telemonitoring over a one-week period using two commercially available devices. 

One device is a commercial smartwatch that monitors the following dementia risk factors: sedentariness/physical activity (steps and metabolic expenditure), sleep-wake cycle, nighttime sleep quality and efficiency, heart rate, and pulse variability over 24 hours as indicators of cardiovascular stress and autonomic nervous function. 

The other device is a common tablet with seven SmartMe&You-TELEMAIA serious video games developed by the research group of Prof. Claudio Babiloni. Performance in these video games is used to monitor or train cognitive functions on a daily basis (each game can be completed in approximately 20 minutes). These functions include vigilance, visuospatial attention, and visuospatial executive functions.  More specifically, the SmartMe&You-TELEMAIA app consists of a battery of seven Tasks (neuropsychological tests) that can be performed on commercial tablets to assess the above cognitive functions. A short video presentation of the tests is available here.

A service designed for monitoring and prevention

This service targets not only the patients with cognitive deficits due to Alzheimer's and related diseases for tertiary prevention, but also older healthy individuals with intact cognition but risk of cognitive decline for primary prevention (e.g., people with high blood pressure, high levels of glycaemia and cholesterol, high body mass index, smoking cigarettes, etc.). 

Author: Prof. Claudio Babiloni, Department of Physiology and Pharmacology “V. Erspamer,” Sapienza University of Rome, Rome (Italy) 

Web resources 

Financing

The design and implementation of the SmartMe&You-TELEMAIA video games on tablet for the monitoring and training of cognitive functions in older individuals at risk of or with cognitive deficits have been developed based on financial support and the technical and regulatory (FAIR and GDPR rules) knowledge platform provided by work packages 2 and 7 of the European Horizon eBRAIN-Health project. 

The clinical validation of the SmartMe&You-TELEMAIA platform in older individuals at risk of or with cognitive deficits due to Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases has been developed based on financial support of work package 7 of the European Horizon eBRAIN-Health project, with additional co-funding from regional, national, and institutional Italian programmes supporting digital health, neurodegeneration research, and innovation.

The clinical studies have been developed in collaboration with teams of the Italian universities of Rome (UNIROMA1), Padua, and Salerno, and with IRCCS San Raffaele Roma

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