Novel Technological Solutions for Assessment, Treatment, and Assistance in Mild Cognitive Impairment

Abstract

Alzheimer's disease, and dementia, represent a common cause of disability and one of the most relevant challenges in the health world. In addition, these conditions do not have, at moment, a pharmacological treatment that can stop the pathological progress. Mild cognitive impairment (MCI), defined as the borderline between normal aging and early dementia, represents a meaningful field of study because, in the transition to dementia, clinicians have defined a useful therapeutic window. Additionally, due to the lack of effective pharmacological interventions, recent years have seen an increase in research into new technological solutions to assess, stimulate, and assist patients afflicted with Alzheimer's disease. This review aims to outline the use of information and communication technologies in the field studying MCI. Particularly, the goal is to depict the framework and describe the most worthwhile research efforts, in order to display the current technologies available, describe the research objectives, and delineate prospective future researches. Regarding data sources, the research was conducted within three databases, PubMed Central, Web of Science, and Scopus, between January 2009 and December 2017. A total of 646 articles were found in the initial search. Accurate definition of the exclusion criteria and selection strategy allowed identification of the most relevant papers to use for the study. Finally, 56 papers were fully evaluated and included in this review. Three major clinical application areas have been portrayed, namely “Cognitive Assessment,” “Treatment,” and “Assistance.” These have been combined with three main technological solutions, specifically “Sensors,” “Personal Devices,” and “Robots.” Furthermore, the study of the publications time series illustrates a steadily increasing trend, characterized by the enrollment of small groups of subjects, and particularly oriented to the subjects assistance using robots companion. In conclusion, despite the new technological solutions for people with MCI have received much interest, particularly regarding robots for assistance, nowadays it still owns vast room for improvement.

Less Is More—Cyclists-Triathlete’s 30 min Cycling Time-Trial Performance Is Impaired With Multiple Feedback Compared to a Single Feedback

“… Holgado et al (2019) reported an impairment in accuracy and reaction time with a high cognitive load (2-back) compared to a low cognitive load (1-back) despite no impairments in power-output (217 W:222 W) and RPE during a 20 min self-paced cycling time-trial. Moreover, numerous studies have reported a decline in visual attention when mental load is increased which corresponds with the findings in the current study ( Hancock and McNaughton, 1986 ; Vickers et al, 1999 ; Pesce et al, 2003 ; Bundesen et al, 2005 ; Diekfuss et al, 2017 ; Mancioppi et al, 2019 ). The accumulation in mental fatigue with multiple feedback as the exercise progressed resulted in a lower average power-output (227.99 ± 42.02 W) compared to single feedback (287.9 ± 60.07 W; Figure 2 ).…”

The Collaborative Aging Research Using Technology Initiative: An Open, Sharable, Technology-Agnostic Platform for the Research Community

“…Despite this rapid evolution, or perhaps because of this high pace of development, this state of the art has yet to result in wide adoption of digital approaches in aging research beyond rather narrow focused use of various wearables or apps. Prior smart home or pervasive computing platforms for aging research have demonstrated the feasibility and potential of such platforms to uniquely inform research [9][10][11][12][13][14][15]. However, several barriers to their proliferation have been identified.…”

“…Many specific technologies and uses of remote monitoring have been developed to advance aging research [e.g., [5][6][7][8]. These advances have tended to benefit a relatively small community of specialty research; the broader gerontological research communities have not seen more widespread uptake of these methods, despite the demonstrated feasibility and potential of smart home and pervasive computing platforms to uniquely inform aging research and healthcare of older adults [9][10][11][12][13][14][15]. A number of barriers have prevented sensor-based and remote monitoring research from becoming ubiquitous: technical challenges, a lack of standards, team science requirements and lack of specialty expertise, narrow real-world use cases, proprietary algorithms and other access-limiting intellectual property rights, and costs.…”

Identifying and Addressing the Challenges Faced by Students with Visual Impairments in Accessing Education and Learning Contents in Relation to ICT: The case of the Tertiary Education in Bangladesh

“…Several studies emphasized the integration of ICT and assistive technology in the social integration of visually impaired people (Agree, 2014;Katerina Mavrou et al, 2017). Several studies also cautioned that the effectiveness of ICT on the betterment of life of visually impaired people is subject to compatibility of assistive technology with ICT devices (Archer et al, 2014;Hakobyan et al, 2013;Hollier, 2017;Mancioppi et al, 2019). These factors exacerbate the digital divide among the students with visual impairment.…”