CLEAR-AI: empowering people living with dementia and their carers to understand and reduce distress

People living with dementia sometimes present with behaviours that carers find difficult to understand and manage. These include aggression, pacing, vocalising, exit-seeking and sexually inappropriate behaviour. They can be present in up to 70% of people living with dementia and often present because of misunderstanding or because of the distress the person experiences trying to cope with the daily challenges of living with their illness. These behaviours increase the risk that a person will move from their home to a care home. CLEAR Dementia Care© helps carers to understand behaviour in the context of the person and their environment, identify unmet needs and respond in ways to reduce distress. We present the pilot of “CLEAR-AI”, an artificial intelligence (AI) powered platform that interprets data from a range of connected smart sensors, apps and devices to model the person with dementia’s daily routines. Analysis of the data and training the AI model enables the platform to identify the triggers that precede distress episodes and to recognise when episodes occur in the context of previous activities in the day. Using these models, and with CLEAR’s assessment as baseline, we can initiate interventions into daily schedules that reduce or mitigate distress where it is likely to arise. The goal is to reduce carer burden and enable the person to live at home with as much independence as possible for as long as possible. Our consortium brings together people living with dementia and their carers, commissioners of digital social care, specialists in dementia care, AI and digital solutions. The co-design approach ensures that we are led by stakeholders’ needs to improve quality of life.