Technologies to monitor cognitive decline - A preliminary case study

Dementia is a progressive and often gradual decline in mental ability that affects thinking, remembering and reasoning. In addition to Alzheimer's disease, the most common form of dementia, there are many other causes of cognitive decline, such as age related memory loss. Technological and medical advancements have pushed life expectancy higher, thus increasing the number of elderly people and consequently the number of patients that need to be hospitalized. This puts financial pressure on medical institutions which, in conjunction with the shortage of geriatric care professionals, has prompted these institutions to seek various cost-cutting strategies. In particular, technological solutions can address these problems through monitoring and assisting patients with cognitive decline and providing support to their caregivers. The aim is to provide a smart environment that lessens the demand for caregivers to manually assess patients' behavior in specific tasks and hence evaluate cognitive decline. Additionally, within these environments it becomes feasible to implement assistive applications that can support dementia patients while performing everyday tasks. In this respect, this paper proposes the fusion of machine vision and an RFID system that can effectively address the above issues. We will also describe two scenarios that correspond to two different activities the patient can perform and provide an insight into the solutions that are used to support patients and their caregivers in these scenarios.