Awardee Organization(s): New York University Rory Meyers College of Nursing
Principal Investigator(s): Ab Brody, PhD, RN, FAAN
Official Project Title: Aliviado Dementia Care Machine Learning Algorithm Development for Caregiving
AITC Partner: PennAITech
Website(s):
https://www.aliviado.org
http://nursing.nyu.edu
https://www.hign.org

Care partners (CP) of persons living with dementia (PLWD) provide crucial support and find significant meaning in the care they provide. They show compassion to those they are caring for, and resilience in the face of adversity. Yet, many CP lack high-quality, evidence-based guidance for addressing care needs of PLWD. One key area that is often challenging to CP, yet where they have little support, is in addressing neuropsychiatric symptoms (NPS) such as agitation or wandering. Most PLWD experience more than one NPS at a time and thus not only do CP lack support in managing these symptoms, they don’t know which symptom to focus on first to reduce their burden and improve the quality of life of the PLWD. This is particularly true in underserved and marginalized communities who are less likely to have access to comprehensive dementia care or supportive services. Higher NPS, particularly in marginalized CP, greatly increases the risk of CP burden, physical and mental health challenges. To help CP make decisions about what NPS to prioritize, we will use artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) to develop a precision clinical decision support algorithm to assist CP in prioritizing which NPS to treat. The algorithm will be inserted into a user-friendly smartphone application which CP can download through the iOS or Android app store. The app will increase access to high-quality dementia support, empower CP to better manage NPS and improve the quality of life for both themselves and the PLWD.

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