SBIR/STTR Award attributes
PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT Currently, 5.7 million people live with Alzheimer’s disease and related dementia (ADRD) in the United States, and this number is projected to reach 13.8 million by 2050. Two-thirds of individuals with ADRD live at home and as a result, approximately 15 million unpaid care partners, mostly family members, are increasingly required to perform complex tasks which causes them significant stress. The major contributors to care partners’ stress are: 1) having low confidence in their competency in their caregiving tasks, such as managing activities of daily living (ADLs), instrumental activities of daily living (IADLs) and behavioral symptoms of ADRD as they change over the course of the disease and 2) being socially isolated with feelings of loneliness. Benten proposes to address these problems through creation of the Avatar Companion to Improve the Lives of Informal care partners of individuals with Alzheimer’s (ACILIA), a home kit with SaaS platform that integrates an embodied conversational agent using AI capabilities (i.e., emotion analysis, sentiment analysis and life-long machine learning [L3] algorithm), with home speakers, a smart watch, and mobile app, to support the CPs on the care journey. ACILIA will provide just-in--time guidance and support to care partners in addition to stage- appropriate education and training on how to manage caregiving tasks. It will also engage in natural conversations with the care partners detecting sentiments of stress and offering advice and support and connection to a virtual community. ACILIA aims to assist in reducing the family care partners’ stress levels by improving their competency and capabilities in providing care and by providing companionship and support, which will reflect positively on their quality of life and that of their loved ones living with ADRD and aging in place. During this Phase I project, we will develop of a prototype ACILIA using input from an advisory board of informal care partners and people living with ADRD. We will also conduct a pilot test for feasibility of ACILIA among 20 individuals who are in early-middle stage ADRD and their informal care partners to evaluate the usability and acceptance of ACILIA prototype. Successful completion of Phase I will lead to Phase II and evaluating its outcomes. improving informal care partners’ competency, reducing their feeling of loneliness, and reducing their stress levels in an adequately powered randomized controlled trial (RCT).PROJECT NARRATIVE User-centered design and pilot testing conducted for the Phase 1 development of ACILIA will make it possible to evaluate the feasibility of ACILIA to support informal care partners of PLWAD in their care efforts. In the long-term, Benten envisions ACILIA becoming a valuable tool for informal care partners, enabling them to perform their caregiving tasks more effectively by delivering just-in-time stage-appropriate training and stress- reduction support, and offering companionship throughout the journey of providing dementia care.
