Purpose Persons with mild and moderate Alzheimer’s disease experience increasing activity engagement failures, with consequent cognitive, social, and physical drawbacks. The purpose of this paper is to assess a technology-aided program to help these persons to independently start and carry out daily activities at the appropriate times. Design/methodology/approach The program was implemented with eight participants according to an adapted non-concurrent multiple baseline design across participants. The program provided each participant with: timely reminders about the activities to carry out, verbal instructions about the activity steps, and brief encouragements and praise. Findings All participants showed improvement during the program, that is, they managed to independently start the activities at the scheduled times and perform those activities with satisfactory levels of accuracy (i.e. with mean percentages of correct steps nearing or exceeding 90). Originality/value A technology-aided program, such as that used in this study, may help persons with mild and moderate Alzheimer disease engage in daily activities, with possible benefits for their cognitive functioning, social image, and physical condition.

A learning test procedure based on operant principles may be useful in the diagnosis (and eventually rehabilitation) of post-coma persons with minimal responsiveness. This study was aimed at extending the evaluation of such a procedure with seven participants who presented with very limited behavior and apparently severe disorders of consciousness. The procedure was evaluated through an ABACB design, in which A represented baseline phases without stimulation, B intervention phases with brief stimulation periods contingent on specific responses of the participants, and C a control phase in which stimulation was available all the time. Increased responding during the B phases, as opposed to the A and C phases, was taken to indicate learning and possibly a non-reflective expression of phenomenal consciousness. All participants were also evaluated with the coma recovery scale-revised (CRS-R) prior to the start of the learning test procedure and at the end of it. The results of the learning test showed that all participants had significantly higher responding levels during the B phases. The CRS-R scores suggested minimally conscious state for four of them prior to the learning test and for five of them after the completion of the learning test. The implications of the findings are discussed in terms of potential and time cost of the learning test.

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Pilot studies using technology-aided programs to promote verbal reminiscence and mild physical activity (i.e., positive forms of engagement) in persons with moderate or severe Alzheimer’s disease have provided promising results (Lancioni et al., 2015a,b). The present two studies were aimed at upgrading and/or extending the assessment of those programs. Specifically, Study 1 upgraded the program for verbal reminiscence and assessed it with eight new participants. The upgraded version automatically monitored the participants’ verbal behavior during the sessions, in which photos and brief videos were used to foster verbal reminiscence. Monitoring allowed computer approval and reminders to be consistent with the participants’ behavior. Study 2 extended the assessment of the program for promoting mild physical activity with 10 new participants for whom arm-raising responses were targeted. The results of Study 1 showed that the participants’ mean percentages of intervals with verbal engagement/reminiscence were below 10 during baseline and control sessions and between above 50 and nearly 80 during the intervention. The results of Study 2 showed that the mean frequencies of arm-raising responses were about or below four and between about 10 and 19 per session during the baseline and the intervention, respectively. The general implications of the aforementioned results and the need for new research in the area were discussed.