ALPHA: an eAsy inteLligent service Platform for Healthy Ageing

Dementia is one of the biggest global public health challenges facing our generation. Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the most frequent cause of dementia in elderly people over 65 years of age. The typical characteristic of AD is impairment of memory. As the disease progresses, other cognitive domains such as language, praxis, visuo-spatial and executive functions become involved, eventually resulting in global cognitive decline. Behavioral Psychological Symptoms of Dementia (BPSD) problems are constant in AD and have a highly negative impact on the quality of life of patients and their families. ALPHA project aims at developing an intelligent situation-aware system to collect and process information about Alzheimer Disease patients’ life style. Starting from various data provided by caregivers and a set of non-invasive sensors and devices, ALPHA will provide clinicians with new quantitative and qualitative information about patients’ abnormal behavior which, along with medical data, will enhance the accuracy and reliability of monitoring and assessing the patient’s health status. Clinicians will be supported by a suite of specifically designed tools and interfaces to analyze the metadata captured, improve management of personalized care plans and interactions with both patients and caregivers. Furthermore studies of antique records of a former psychiatric hospital will give the chance to widen the knowledge of behavioral disorders thus allowing to compare the ancient and the recently ones and to probabilistically determine relation between type of dementia and behavioral disorders.