A Framework for Monitoring Patients with Alzheimer’s and Other Dementias

Alzheimer's disease affects the quality of life of millions of people, causing a significant impact on the patient's cognitive capacity and diminishing their independence. In the context of intelligent environments, monitoring Alzheimer's patients in their homes has the potential for facilitating the accomplishment of tasks and preventing incidents caused by their limitations. This can be done by gathering context information provided through the use of sensors. Current solutions, however, fail to provide ways to customize actions and alerts to family and caretakers. In this paper, we tackle this problem by proposing a framework for monitoring patients with Alzheimer's disease, which provides an anomaly detection module that can be easily customized, allowing the adaptation of the system to different needs. Interviews conducted with caretakers and family members of patients with Alzheimer's and dementia show that our proposed approach is feasible and relevant.