The Centre for Care Research & Technology aims to integrate low-cost, smart technologies into the home to understand how people are living with dementia, the major challenges they face, and how best to support them and their caregivers. The multidisciplinary team of investigators have expertise in computer science engineering, synthetic biology, neuroscience, and clinical medicine.
The Centre aims to:
- Create unobtrusive and practical continuous monitoring technologies that derive key dementia-related measures such as EEG, sleep disturbance and infection diagnosis in the home;
- Develop reliable, safe and secure artificial intelligence (AI) systems that improve health autonomy by predicting clinical events, supporting activities of daily living and facilitating communication between people living with dementia, carers and health professionals;
- Integrate robotic devices that monitor and manage the environment for improved safety and patient quality of life;
- Move the point-of-care into the home and allow clinical teams to provide personalised, predictive and preventative healthcare.
Researchers at the Centre are optimising technologies in a model home environment (the Living Lab), deploying them in real-world evaluation studies, and then, having established an evidence base, delivering them to people living with dementia and their carers.
The new technology promises to transform major aspects of the health system by shifting the focus from the clinic or hospital into the home. This will reduce costs and improve the ability to respond rapidly when issues arise. The technology is already providing insights into how dementia develops that will prove invaluable in informing measurement of disease progression, as well as improving the quality of life of the user and their carer.
The Living Lab, the model home at the UK DRI Centre for Care Research & Technology.
Credit: Thomas Angus, Imperial College London.
