Environment-Aware System for Alzheimer’s Patients

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Introduction
The population of Europe has been aging in these past few decades and Portugal is not an exception.

Alzheimer's is a type of dementia that causes problems with memory, thinking and behavior. Symptoms usually develop slowly and get worse over time, becoming severe enough to interfere with daily tasks such as eating and performing daily hygiene.

This disease accounts for more than 60 percent of all dementia cases.

Alzheimer's is a progressive disease, where dementia symptoms gradually worsen over the number of years. In the beginning it’s mainly memory loss, but in the advanced stages patients lose the capacity to carry on with a conversation or even respond to the environment.

Alzheimer's has no current cure, but treatments for symptoms are available and research continues. It cannot be stopped yet from progressing; the worsening of dementia symptoms can only be temporarily slowed to improve the quality of life for those with Alzheimer's and their caregivers. Today, there is a worldwide effort under way to find better ways to treat the disease, delay its onset, and prevent it from developing.

The observation of patients with Alzheimer's disease showed that they present great difficulties in performing activities of daily living and that, these changes, occur very early in the disease. These observations led to speculate whether patients with this condition do not present a deficit of attention, which would justify their inability to perform said activities.

Another identified problem consists of disturbances during sleep, which worsen with the disease’s progression: a patient at an early stage can sleep for long periods of time while a patient in an advanced state is only able to sleep for a short time, getting to sleep in the afternoon or waking up several times during the night.

The objective of this thesis is the creation of a non-invasive device for the patient in order to be able to register the body temperature and humidity since Alzheimer’s disease can cause sleep disturbances, nightmares and agitation. Another important aspect is the tracking of the patient and environmental conditions.
Motivation

Alzheimer's disease affects about 90,000 people in Portugal (Alzheimer, Portugal), which makes this disease a public health problem. As this is a neurodegenerative disease, patients gradually lose autonomy.
This project not only has an interesting area in electronics but also a social purpose as the device has the aim to keep track of medical/physical records to help the caregiver or even the professional to give a better assistance to the patient.