An emerging benefit of artificial intelligence and digital solutions in caring for people living with dementia is the ability to create an easily-accessed profile of long-term care residents and their behavioral needs.
In fact, a digital aid is so effective in helping caregivers during episodes such as wandering that it could reduce the need for psychotropic drugs, according to at least one AI-enabled app developer for memory care.
“You often have several caregivers coming into a home or residence, there’s different people working with the resident,” said Linda Buscemi, PhD, and co-founder of memory tech company TapRoot. “How do we know a problem [with a resident] is environmental? Gender? Time of day? An app is able to provide that information at your fingertips.”
TapRoot’s solution, Ella, has been around for several years for long-term care providers, but the company is hoping to make the program available to the general public soon, Buscemi said during a recent discussion on the “Dementia Untangled” podcast.
Caregivers who use Ella not only have a built-in profile of residents, but when they describe a particular episode — for instance, if a resident is having trouble in the bathroom — the app can pull more than 600 strategies for handling an episode; in data analyses, the app correctly identified a solution 87% of the time, Buscemi said.
Podcast co-host Heather Mulder described a situation when she was a caregiver, where she spent three hours walking in circles with someone who had wandered out of the residence and was certain the family was about to come.
“The amount of training I’d received to handle [my residents] was minimal,” Mulder concluded. “If only there was an app at that time.”
Although TapRoot’s Ella is one of several apps aimed at caregivers, several AI-enabled apps are designed to help older adults who are living with dementia in various ways. The oldest apps track behaviors and try to help older adults with their daily routines. More recent apps include Amicus Brain’s sentence-completion app for those who have challenges with speech, and another in development that provides multilingual touch screen games for dementia.
