Comprehensive Brain Testing for Dementia for Senior Care Facilities

Senior living facilities care for high-density populations of aging individuals, with many residents having highly complex comorbidities. The combination of drastic lifestyle changes, such as the change of environment, isolation from family, challenges with mental health, and lack of intellectual stimulation, can lead to accelerated and increased rates of dementia in senior care facilities. 

Understanding how the brains of seniors are aging and changing while living in such facilities is critical to determining their care and ensuring they have access to the resources and support systems they need to live healthy and happy lifestyles. However, many residents of senior care facilities are not being regularly tested and monitored for changes in cognition. 

Below, we detail the need for comprehensive brain testing for dementia as well as criteria for monitoring and diagnostic tools for senior care facilities.

The Need for Brain Testing for Dementia

Determining which residents need to move to memory care units from normal senior living environments is challenging. While family members or loved ones sometimes step in to make these decisions, this isn’t always the case. Many senior care facilities must rely on their caregiving staff to identify neurocognitive issues within residents, as they are not being regularly assessed and monitored for dementia quantitatively.

There is a strong need for senior care facilities to incorporate regular neurocognitive testing of residents to truly understand their mental, physical, and emotional needs. Beyond that, regular assessments of brain health can aid in identifying neurological diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease, in residents in the early, more treatable stages of such diseases. Robust, longitudinal brain health tracking enables proactive versus reactive care for patients and thus, better health outcomes.

Integrating Comprehensive Brain Testing for Dementia 

There is a question of feasibility for realistically incorporating regular neurocognitive testing in senior care facilities. To properly understand changes in brain health, a longitudinal analysis must be performed, meaning regular and frequent testing of neurocognitive and functional aspects of brain health. 

Some facilities utilize traditional pencil and paper neurocognitive assessments such as The Mini-Mental State Exam, the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, and the MiniCog. However, these assessments often require a healthcare professional to administer and thus require significant time due to office waiting times, administration, and the analysis of analog measurements. Such tools for monitoring brain health lack the infrastructure to feasibly perform longitudinal analysis. The narrow nature and lack of ecological validity of these assessments also pose the issue of whether or not they measure an individual’s cognitive and functional abilities necessary to complete activities of daily living, such as dressing, bathing, and grooming. 

Ideal Characteristics for Assessment and Monitoring Tools

When considering implementing brain testing for dementia, there are several characteristics to be on the lookout for. The following are key attributes to consider when looking for the right testing option for senior care facilities:

• Tools that provide a high granularity of data result in a more robust and comprehensive understanding of brain health.
• Measurement and analysis tools that can feed digital data back to a comprehensive monitoring platform can inform senior care facility management and caregivers on which patients may be experiencing changes in brain health.
• Assessments that do not require a human to administer or coach an individual through the test reduce the risk of human-to-human variability, and tools that can be used with only the presence of a caregiver allow for ease of implementation in senior care facilities. 
• Measurement tools that assess both cognitive and functional aspects of brain function can provide greater insight.
• A detailed measurement scale and scoring system can help care facility management and caregivers quantitatively assess brain health to make the most informed decisions possible for resident care.

Brain Health Monitoring and Diagnostics for Senior Care Facilities

At Altoida, we strive to revolutionize the way to assess and measure neurocognitive function and diagnose neurological diseases to aid in the effort of providing seniors with better care. We are developing a precision neurology device to measure and evaluate cognitive and functional digital biomarkers to provide the most robust method for analyzing brain health data. Individuals complete a combination of immersive augmented reality activities, motor activities, and other digital tasks on any smart device.

These activities are designed to be completed in 10 minutes and assess the brain under a cognitive load representative of activities of daily living. Nearly 800 digital biomarkers—shown to be clinically significant through over 20 years of scientific research—will be collected using sensors on the user’s smartphone or tablet. These digital biomarkers map to 11 unique neurocognitive domains and will be used to measure and monitor neurocognitive function over time. After our recent Breakthrough Device designation, this method for assessing brain health, along with our innovative artificial intelligence, will allow Altoida to provide individuals with a predictive score. This score will enable a highly accurate prediction of whether an individual aged 55 and over will or will not convert from Mild Cognitive Impairment to Alzheimer’s disease within 12 months.