Exercising the mind: Alexa based device developed for people with dementia

Ian Bolland spoke to Dave Pearson an engineer at EDF Energy whose hobby saw him develop a medical device that can be used via Amazon’s Alexa, which recently won the Ingenuity Health Champion prize sponsored by Nuffield Health.

The idea of the solution came about because of Pearson’s father-in-law who lives with dementia as he struggled to communicate with the wider family. MindMinder uses the artificial intelligence provided by Amazon Alexa to develop a personalised relationship with people with dementia to provide active stimuli and reminders while also developing a long-term assessment dataset that can be used to monitor and inform care providers and family regarding rates of mental stability and/or decline.

Pearson explains: “MindMinder was just a hobby of mine really which has grown legs and to get me off things like Facebook – and to try to redevelop that spare time to be more productive and exercise a few brain cells along the way.”

Many people with dementia have good and bad days at varying points and can sometimes be increasingly harder to predict. Pearson was trying to use any data at his disposal to allow for more predictability when it came to his father-in-law’s condition.

“I figured if you could give a day-by-day analysis of someone's state, but also introduce links between that data and the environment and other knowledge about their lifestyle; it might be able to inform a wider understanding of dementia in a research setting as well.”

The draw of using Alexa was, in part, the accessibility of the technology. The objective is to help mentally stimulate someone living with dementia in a way that isn’t so question and answer focused – or to present exam-like questions – but to allow people to recall their own experiences, remember anecdotes or individuals.

“To move away from a clinical assessment tool to something that has a bit of banter woven into the story allows someone to be a bit more engaged with it, and they don’t find it quite as threatening, or clinical.”

The objective is that is it allows someone to have a little more resonance with the story and allows them to trigger certain thought processes.

Pearson outlined three things that he feels this approach can achieve:

“The first one is helping people live independently for longer in their own homes. Part of it will include things like reminders, including take medication or a drink of water, go and do a bit of exercise, a reminder to put the bins out. So, from a family member point of view, it gives peace of mind about a relative that they can live independently for just a little bit longer.

“The second thing is providing a reliable, consistent source of dementia assessment information that can be used to engage with clinical people and doing that in a way that isn't resource dependent on clinicians or nurses and home visits and all those other things.

“It will move away from needing day-to-day NHS resources to deliver assessments reliably at an individual level. The third thing I think is building on the wider context is if this can be embedded in a wider population to support in the field, the NHS or another organisation, then across a huge population of people, you can also develop a data set that you know is not unique to an individual.”

Examples include the weather and environmental factors which could allow for a broader understanding as to what may make dementia worse or improve a person’s quality of life with the condition.

At the time of our conversation, Pearson explained that this idea only started out in February and was still in development, with the technology about to go through its first trial, having received support from the Nuffield Partnership and Ingenuity Programme. He said that he plans to use the funding at his disposal to try and accelerate the product to market.

Summing up, he said: “I’m confident that from a deliverability point of view there’s blockers at the moment so I’m quite positive about it.”