Frailsafe: Early Detection of Frailty

This columns aims to describe the characteristics of current cyberpsychology research in Europe. In particular, CyberEurope aims at describing the leading research groups and projects running on the other side of the Ocean.

The ageing of the population is steeply increasing worldwide. A consequence of age-related decline is the clinical condition of frailty. Frailty is a biological syndrome of decreased reserve and resistance to stressors, resulting from cumulative decline across multiple physiologic systems and causing vulnerability to adverse outcomes. Susceptibility to stressors is influenced by biological, behavioral, environmental, and social risk factors, with the main consequence being an increased risk for multiple adverse health outcomes, including disability, morbidity, falls, hospitalization, institutionalization, and death. However, frailty is a dynamic and not an irreversible process. It seems preventable and may be delayed or reversed.

In this view, one of the main objectives of Frailsafe (sensing and predictive treatment of frailty and associated comorbidities using advanced personalized patient models and advanced interventions; http://frailsafe-project.eu/) is to determine the risk of triggering events that would make a person tip from the pre-frail category to the frail one.

To do so, the technical partners have designed and developed a detailed definition of a personalized Virtual Patient Model (VPM) composed of information about older people.

This information will be collected by unobtrusively monitoring everyday life through a variety of embedded and wireless smart indoor and outdoor sensors, social interaction, clinical assessment, and self-evaluation tests. In other words, this VPM will be the older person's virtual alter ego, reflecting their medical condition.

This will facilitate the analysis of the collected data and frailty feature extraction; support the physician's decision process, ranging from general health preservation monitoring to critical situation management; allow an adaptation of the user interfacing; and provide personalized feedback to the older person via life-style change suggestions, behavior guidelines, and medical intervention strategies.

Thanks to this personalized VPM and monitoring system, older people will benefit from a system that gives them an optimal overview of their (pre-) frail state and, at the same time, provides them with a tool that enables them to choose the right decision concerning frailty prevention.

Virtual Supermarket Game

Another Frailsafe tool to monitor the physical and cognitive status of older people is a virtual supermarket game (VSM). It has already been in use in the project and will be further developed until its end, thanks to volunteers' feedback.

The VSM simulates the experience of a person shopping in a supermarket in a three-dimensional environment. At the beginning of the game, a list of items is presented, and the task of the user is to navigate through the supermarket, select the listed items from the shelves in the correct quantities, and pay the correct amount at the cashier.

Early Detection of Cognitive Impairment and Alzheimer's Disease

The performance of users in the game has been shown to be related to indications of mild cognitive impairment (MCI), which is a condition that often predates Alzheimer's disease. In this respect, it is a valuable tool to detect deterioration in the cognitive function of the users, which is often an indication and result of frailty.