The UK DRI Centre for Care Research & Technology is developing dementia-friendly smart homes: intelligent environments that transform and personalise care. Our flagship programme, the Minder platform, combines advances in digital technology and artificial intelligence to deliver personalised care of the highest quality in private homes, promoting independent living and supporting carers.
Minder is integrated with a dedicated NHS team to enhance clinical care and prevent complications that may lead to hospitalisation. People living with dementia are disproportionately likely to be hospitalised, but around a fifth of these admissions are due to potentially preventable causes, such as falls, neuropsychiatric problems or infection. Minder detects early warning signs and alerts the integrated NHS team, facilitating early intervention and reducing preventable hospitalisations among this group.
This innovative model of care provision could bring major benefits for both people with dementia and public services, by promoting personalised, community-based care, and enabling people with dementia to live independently in their own home for longer.
A short film exploring the perspective of people living with dementia who are participating in the Minder trial.
The Minder platform
hospital admissions of people with dementia are preventable
homes trialling Minder
The Minder platform uses a range of home sensors to collect environmental, physiological and activity data in unprecedented detail, in real time. AI is trained to identify clinically important events and provide alerts to a clinical monitoring team, who provide support, with Minder informing their clinical and care decisions. The data collection process ensures that privacy and security are safeguarded, with limited data shared centrally.
Throughout the development of Minder, it has been essential to build a platform that people with dementia can and want to use. Supported by the Helix Centre, UK DRI scientists have worked in close partnership with people affected and their carers.
Minder is currently in its pilot stage, in around 100 private homes, directly supported by a four-person clinical monitoring team in the NHS. Data from more than 30,000 days has been collected, demonstrating Minder’s acceptability and technical feasibility in a range of home environments.
The Centre has recently begun a new two-year study to ready Minder for integration with the NHS and social care services. The team, funded by medical research charity LifeArc, is working with people living with dementia and their caregivers to co-design a new service model for Minder-NHS integration. They will also develop a new protocol for linking and data sharing, and assess the clinical, economic and patient benefits of the model.
In the future, the Minder platform may enable a new model of at-home clinical trial delivery, in which the rich data Minder collects is harnessed to measure participants’ progress, treatment efficacy and side effects. Prof Sharp and the team are already using data generated by Minder to develop digital biomarkers that detect and track disease progression; you can read more here.