AI innovations to transform living with dementia awarded £1.9 million

Longitude Prize on Dementia champions personalized tech that to helps people living with dementia enjoy independent and fulfilled lives.
An app that helps people living with dementia communicate, high-tech facial recognition glasses to identify familiar faces and an augmented reality map to help people safely find their way around their area are among the semi-finalists of the Longitude Prize on Dementia.

The semi-finalists will each receive £80k grants as part of the overall £4m Longitude Prize on Dementia; funded by Alzheimer’s Society and Innovate UK and delivered by Challenge Works. The Prize aims to drive the co-creation of personalized technologies to help people living with dementia enjoy independent and fulfilled lives.

Longevity.Technology: Dementia exacts a heavy toll on individuals, families and societies worldwide and presents a significant challenge to healthcare systems, but effective treatment for neurodegenerative diseases is still mostly still in research in the lab. While the FDA has approved some drugs for Alzheimer’s treatment recently, these are both expensive and aimed at sufferers in the early stages – not much comfort for the 55 million people globally who are currently living with dementia [1]. The biggest risk factor for dementia is aging – for people aged between 65 and 69, around 2 in every 100 people have dementia [2]. Funding for projects that help people now as as important as research into drugs that will help people in the future. It’s time to say: “Hello, Yellow Brick Road”.
Discovery Awards of £80k have been awarded to teams in the UK, USA, Canada, Australia, UAE, Colombia, Portugal and the Isle of Man to develop new technologies to improve the lives of people living with dementia. The teams will now work alongside people living with dementia and their carers to ensure technologies are intuitive, easy-to-use and able to adapt to their changing needs.

Innovations include:

An augmented reality map to prevent people getting lost or confused – The Dorothy Community from Care City (UK) is a digital “Yellow Brick Road” map that uses augmented reality to provide virtual directions, visualized pathways and simple instructions for people living with dementia to independently navigate their local community.
High-tech specs for facial recognition – iMAGIC smart glasses are being developed by Khalifa University (UAE) to help people recognize familiar faces, provide reminders and alerts, zoom in and out to facilitate navigation, make phone calls to loved ones and monitor vital signs. The glasses will also eventually be able to help identify objects that sport a QR code (a type of barcode that can be scanned and interpreted by computer software).
A virtual speech assistant app to fill in missing words – the interactive AI software from Amicus Brain Innovations (US) will use speech and language processing to listen to “broken speech” – a common challenge as dementia advances – and speak aloud the AI’s “repaired” rendition of what the user intended to say.
Kate Lee, CEO, Alzheimer’s Society, said: “It’s vital people with dementia are able to live independently, doing things that bring them fulfilment, for as long as possible. And that’s exactly what tech innovation can provide.” She added that the Discovery Award winners all have the capacity to develop cutting-edge tools that bring hope to the here and now, and make a tangible difference to people’s lives.

“New drugs have been discovered which slow the progression of early Alzheimer’s disease, but there’s still more to do,” she said. “Alzheimer’s Society remains committed to innovative projects like the Longitude Prize so that together we can improve the lives of people living with dementia and their families.”

Indro Mukerjee, CEO, Innovate UK said: “By addressing dementia the Longitude Prize tackles a global health crisis. Worldwide, around 50 million people have dementia and there are nearly 10 million new cases every year. Innovate UK is pleased to support this initiative along with the other vital work we are doing in this area. The UK is a global leader in innovation for healthy ageing and this prize will incentivize new technologies. This will help people with dementia, their families and their carers, to make living with the condition easier”.

The Longitude Prize on Dementia is driving the development of personalized, technology-based tools that are co-created with people living with the early stages of dementia, helping them live independent, more fulfilled lives and enabling them to do the things they enjoy.

The competition itself has also been co-designed with people living with dementia. Judges were advised in their decision making by the prizes Lived Experience Advisory Panel (LEAP).

AI innovations to transform living with dementia awarded £1.9 million