Background:
People living with dementia frequently experience Behavioural and Psychological Symptoms of Dementia (BPSD), including depression, anxiety, agitation, hallucinations, and delusions. These symptoms are highly prevalent, distressing for both patients and caregivers, and contribute to increased hospital admissions, earlier care home placement, and higher healthcare costs. Despite growing recognition of their impact, systematic tracking of BPSD over time remains limited, with current assessments largely informant-based and focused on crisis or emergency events. There is a need to understand how BPSD are recorded in healthcare data and how responses to interventions are captured.
Novelty & Importance:
Digital innovations could transform dementia care by enabling real-time, day-to-day monitoring of BPSD through multimodal physiological and behavioural signals. Such technologies could support earlier, preventative interventions, improve symptom management, and enhance the quality of life for people with dementia at home and in supported care, while alleviating caregiver burden.
Aims and objectives:
To systematically evaluate existing clinical data across the dementia trajectory to understand the course and reporting of BPSD and to explore novel technologies for their detection, monitoring, and management. Specific objectives are to: (i) examine how BPSD are recorded across key stages of dementia, (ii) characterise their longitudinal course, (iii) assess current methods for capturing changes and intervention responses, and (iv) identify opportunities for integrating digital tools to enable proactive monitoring and personalised management of BPSD.
This project is co-funded by Neurometry.