TITLE: Designing Digital Tools for ADRDs that Double as Assessments and Interventions
ABSTRACT: The world’s population is aging, and the increasing number of older adults with Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRDs) is a challenge our society must address. New modes of technology offer unprecedented opportunities to address some of the needs that accompany cognitive decline by providing automated health assessment and memory interventions. In this work, we create EMMA, a memory management app, that combines the two capabilities. Through participatory design with older adults and caregivers, we design an app that is accessible and effective as a compensatory aid for older adults with memory decline. By collecting data from app usage in combination with sensor data, we extract digital markers that predict multiple clinical measures. We evaluate this app using data from 14 participants with mild cognitive impairment. We observed moderate to large correlations between predicted and ground-truth assessment scores for each clinical assessment.
