Digital biomarkers for Alzheimer’s disease: the mobile/wearable devices opportunity

Abstract

Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) represents a major and rapidly growing burden to the healthcare ecosystem. A growing body of evidence indicates that cognitive, behavioral, sensory, and motor changes may precede clinical manifestations of AD by several years. Existing tests designed to diagnose neurodegenerative diseases, while well-validated, are often less effective in detecting deviations from normal cognitive decline trajectory in the earliest stages of the disease. In the quest for gold standards for AD assessment, there is a growing interest in the identification of readily accessible digital biomarkers, which harness advances in consumer grade mobile and wearable technologies. Topics examined include a review of existing early clinical manifestations of AD and a path to the respective sensor and mobile/wearable device usage to acquire domain-centric data towards objective, high frequency and passive digital phenotyping.

Anticipating and Mitigating the Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Alzheimer's Disease and Related Dementias

“…It will accelerate the adoption of technologies and tools that permit remote assessments. [38][39][40] In the field of ADRD research, we believe it will impact most the traditional neuropsychological and functional assessments on which most primary outcomes for ADRD interventions trials are based. 41 In the long term, ADRD research will also benefit from these technological innovations because they should allow the recruitment and follow-up of much larger samples at reduced costs.…”

Challenges in Alzheimer's Disease Drug Discovery and Development: The Role of Modeling, Simulation, and Open Data

“…M&S will help answer this question by making use of data from validation studies. A validation study may, for example, follow untreated individuals longitudinally using both traditional and digital assessments . The data could be fit to a model, and parameters to describe disease progression could be estimated for both types of measurements.…”

“…A validation study may, for example, follow untreated individuals longitudinally using both traditional and digital assessments. 74 The data could be fit to a model, and parameters to describe disease progression could be estimated for both types of measurements. Simulations could then be performed to estimate the sample size for a drug efficacy study when using digital or traditional assessments.…”

Quantified Complementary and Alternative Medicine: Convergence of Digital Health Technologies and Complementary and Alternative Medicine

“…Sensor technologies are able to provide metrics by means of active (prompted) or passive (unnoticed) measurements, offering considerable flexibility in approach. Those high-frequency longitudinal data sets can then be used for characterisation of a disease [2]. This yields a solution to the often acclaimed subjectivity of patient-reported outcome, that is common not only in CAM research.…”

“…As doctors spend more time with administrational work rather than talking with their patients, we have an information bias that could be circumvented if we had the right tools to effectively summarise a patient's health status. Providing longitudinal disease-related digital biomarkers to a healthcare practitioner to allow for objective and continuous clinical evaluation of a person's lifestyle could be a necessary step towards a more holistic medical understanding not only in CAM [2].…”