Monitoring of Lifestyle and Cognitive Status in Seniors at Risk of Dementia: The SmartAging Program

Abstract

Lifestyle and risk factors affect the development of diseases, cognitive decline and loss of autonomy during ageing. In the Italian Smart Health 2.0 project, we developed the SmartAging program offering innovative ICT solutions, grounded upon the Italian Telecom platform (“Nuvola Italian Home Doctor”), to contrast cognitive decline and support “active” ageing. Specifically, the SmartAging program includes tools for daily telemonitoring at subjects’ home of: (i) eating behaviour, (ii) physical exercise, (iii) tobacco consumption, (iv) cultural, social and relational activities, (v) cognitive functions, (vi) weight, temperature, and blood pressure. Furthermore, a Point of Care device and a Self-Assessment Health Station (i.e. health medical equipment), in proximity to the subjects’ home, allowed periodic measures of blood biomarkers and physiological indices. To demonstrate the feasibility of this program, we performed a clinical proof of concept study for 16 weeks on 10 elderly subjects (5 being oncological long-term survivors). All subjects expressed a need for education and assistance concerning a healthy lifestyle. Most of them expressed a preference for ICT-based home programs to improve the lifestyle over institutional programs. All expressed satisfaction with the SmartAging program in terms of simplicity, clarity, adequacy and reported a positive impact on their quality of life. These results suggest that the SmartAging program fulfills all the requirements to be considered an innovative technological approach for the lifestyle education and telemonitoring of seniors, to prevent dementing disorders. Some concepts of the SmartAging program have been further developing in the H2020-MSCA-ITN-ETN BBDiag project.