Managing Cognitive Decline through Social Robot-Based Intervention: The Study Protocol of a European Randomized Controlled Trial (Preprint)

Abstract

UNSTRUCTURED Every year in Europe the number of diagnoses of dementia increases significantly. Dementia is challenging the society in terms of quality of life, costs of healthcare systems and caregivers’ burden. Dementia is often preceded by a status of mild cognitive impairment (MCI), during which healthy lifestyle and cognitive therapy seem to be effective in counteracting the decline. The engAGE project aims to build a technological platform to counteract cognitive decline in people with MCI through both cognitive therapy and lifestyle management. The platform is built around the social robot Pepper, which provides cognitive therapy weekly at healthcare or daycare facilities. In addition to the social robot, a mobile app and an activity tracker are integrated within the platform to help older people with MCI to monitor their sleep and physical activity, other than offer cognitive games at home. All the data gathered from the three devices flow via-cloud into the platform to be analyzed by a machine learning (ML) algorithm aimed to predict the ongoing of cognitive decline. The proof of concept of the engAGE platform is a 6-months long randomized controlled trial (RCT) aimed to test the solution in three European countries: Italy, Switzerland, and Norway. The primary interest of the study is to assess the impact of the engAGE platform on cognitive capacity through quantitative and standardized scales. In addition, changes in social engagement and quality of life are measured. Then, the proof of concept also focuses on the acceptability and usability of the platform, evaluated through the SUS scale and the UTAUT questionnaire. The proof of concept, is an innovative study focused on the impact of a technological-based intervention designed for older people with MCI, that aims to tackle directly the cognitive decline through cognitive training, and indirectly through the improvement in terms of quality of life, social engagement, physical activity and sleep quality of primary end users.