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SMART4MD

(Support Monitoring and Reminder Technology for Mild Dementia)

Project details:

SMART4MD is an EU-wide research project focused on empowering people with mild dementia and on supporting their carers, by creating a system designed to help with adherence to treatment and sharing health-related data.

This is a four-year project, involving 10 project partners from industry and academia and with five clinical sites around Europe. The study is co-financed by the European Union under the EU Framework Programme for Research and Innovation Horizon 2020.

Project objectives/aims:

The aim of the SMART4MD project is to validate a novel support tool for patients with mild dementia (MD), helping them to maintain their independence and quality of life. The tool is based on the established, but innovative Pow Health mobile application that reminds patients of activities in their treatment plan and allows patients to share information with their doctors and carers. In its current guise the Pow Health platform is not optimised for use by MD patients and unproven for their condition. The projects aims to address this through four objectives: 

  1. Adapt the platform specifically for MD patients (SMART4MD), through user-centric design
  2. Validate SMART4MD’s benefits for users through large-scale pilots
  3. Assess the financial savings that SMART4MD provides to healthcare systems
  4. Prepare for sustainable pan-European roll-out of the application.

For further information, please visit the SMART4MD project website.

About dementia:

It is estimated that around nine million people are living with dementia in Europe. 

Dementia is a syndrome or set of symptoms, typically involving loss of memory, mood changes and problems with thinking, orientation, comprehension, calculation, learning capacity, language and judgement. These symptoms tend to develop gradually over a lengthy period of time, as the brain becomes impaired due to damage from the underlying dementia condition. 

Dementia is not a disease per se. There are over a hundred types of dementia and most are caused by or associated with a specific disease, the most common one being Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Although dementia is a medical condition, it has a social, psychological, emotional and economic impact on people’s lives. It affects people in different ways.

About the EU Framework Programme for Research and Innovation - Horizon 2020:

Horizon 2020 is the biggest EU Research and Innovation programme ever with nearly €80 billion of funding available over seven years (2014 to 2020) - in addition to the private investment that this money will attract. It promises more breakthroughs, discoveries and world-firsts by taking great ideas from the lab to the market. 

More information can be found on the Europa EU website