International cross collaboration to help dementia patients

Researchers learn from each other

A growing elderly population requires new health technology solutions and smart home environments. It also requires a cross collaboration between many areas of expertise, like medicine, social science and information technology. An example of this collaboration is the European project Remind, where the main purpose is to generate and share knowledge between the different organisations. The goal is to develop technology that can help people who are suffering from dementia. The partner organisations in Remind come from the industry as well as academia, and they represent nine different countries. Halmstad University, which is one of the partners of Remind, both receive and send research staff on exchange to other Remind organisations.

”The aim of the Remind project is to exchange experiences between different universities and companies in the use of computational techniques, in order to improve compliance to reminders within smart environments for patients with dementia. One example of such a ‘reminder’ is to remind a person – at the right time and occasion – to take their medication”, says Farzaneh Etminani, postdoc at the School of Information Technology at Halmstad University and one of the researchers involved in the Remind project.

Important to understand the environment of the patient

Markus Lingman, a Medical Doctor and Strategist in the Halland Hospital board, Region Halland, is collaborating with the Remind researchers:

“A large portion of our elderly are living with dementia. It is also one of few increasing causes of death in our part of the world. By working closely in the intersection between different skills and knowledge domains, we can develop healthcare tools adapted for this group of patients. It is also important to figure out how innovations, new ideas and thoughts will fit into the ecosystem of care surrounding each individual with dementia. We have to understand the environment of the patient in order to succeed with this necessary development of healthcare”, says Markus Lingman.

Visiting researcher is developing social robots

Farzaneh Etminani would like to see more knowledge exchanges ahead:

“We are looking forward to host more researchers and staff from other partners organisations, as well as from the whole society including academia, hospitals and companies to share our knowledge and learn new things. The final goal is to help people with dementia to have a higher quality of life”, says Farzaneh Etminani.

Linda Ong from I+ srl in Italy visited Halmstad University during eight months in 2018/2019:

”The main objective for my part of the project is to implement natural language processing for human interaction, that is implementing sentiment and topic analysis for simple conversation with social robots. The vision is that a social robot can understand the conversation with a human and, in a deeper sense, be able to understand the unmet need in vulnerable groups”, says Linda Ong.

Text: Louise Wandel
Photo: Unsplash