Social Support Aid For People With Dementia

This project develops a novel social support aid (SSA) to allow persons with memory concerns (PWMCs) to more fully engage in their social network and enhance their quality of life. The SSA will assist people in an early stage of dementia, e.g., Alzheimer's disease or related dementia, who desire social interaction, but struggle to remember names and relationships. It provides memory cuing by displaying the names and relationships of the people with whom PWMCs are engaged. The investigators anticipate that the SSA will offer robust support for care partners and PWMCs in various communities. The SSA is not intended to replace caregiver aids, but rather augment them to further improve quality of life. Millions of Americans have dementia, the loss of mental functions, e.g., thinking, memory, and reasoning, which interferes with their daily functioning. While some cases of dementia are caused by medical conditions that can be treated, most cannot be reversed. Hence, the focus switches from treatment to palliative care, i.e., developing a plan to make life easier and more comfortable for individuals with dementia and their caregivers. Assistive technologies to enhance living with dementia, let alone studies that evaluate their efficacy, are underdeveloped. The proposed project aims to begin filling this scientific and clinical gap by developing a social support aid and formally evaluating its utility via a sufficiently powered randomized controlled trial.

This phase II Small Business Innovation Research project will continue work started in phase I and complete a product. The aim of this human subjects research protocol is to evaluate whether the SSA exerts positive benefits for PWMCs' social connections, communication, and quality of life via an embedded experimental mixed methods design that combines the collection and analysis of qualitative data within a traditional randomized controlled trial (RCT) design. The investigators hypothesize that the proposed SSA will exert positive benefits on the social connections, communication, and quality of life of people in early stage dementia.