Caring for family members with Alzheimer’s or dementia can be a strenuous task, full of long nights of broken sleep and patient injuries. With AlzAlert, Meredeth Rowe hopes to make this time a little easier.
As a University of Florida nurse and researcher, Rowe has spent 12 years working with Alzheimer’s and dementia patients and their caregivers. She found that caregivers consistently suffered from poor health due to a lack of sleep caused by the nighttime activity of their loved ones.
Many Alzheimer’s and dementia patients can have erratic sleeping habits, moving around the house during the night and sometimes injuring themselves. Keeping track of movement and location can be a grueling task for an in-home caregiver.
Rowe figured the best way to improve caregiver sleep was to let caregivers know when they could go to sleep without worry.
Since both patients and caregivers are normally resistant to making the patient wear something, like an RF transmitter tag, Rowe was careful to create a technology that avoids typical issues. AlzAlert allows the caregiver to move around the house while the patient is in bed and not trip alarms, and allows the caregiver to know when a patient had left the bed. She developed a bed-occupancy sensor which shuts down alarms throughout the house when the patient is in bed, but links with motion sensors throughout the house and activates proximity alarms when the patient is moving around. The alarms tell the caregiver where the patient is, without requiring the caregiver to search the house.
Most alert technology is intended for older adults who live on their own. AlzAlert is the first technology focused on aiding caregivers and improving caregiver health.
Rowe conducted a clinical trial with 50 caregivers and patients, showing an 80 percent reduction in patient injuries, as well as improved caregiver sleep and overall wellbeing. Improved wellbeing allows caregivers to continue to watch over their loved ones for a longer period of time. She believes the technology will also be useful for parents with autistic children and other in-home caregivers.
Through the Cade Prize, Rowe wants to find a commercial manufacturing company to upgrade the AlzAlert prototype to a commercial system, with a better, easy-to-use interface. With a more commercial product, Rowe hopes it will be easier to attract investors.
“We are very grateful for the Cade program,” Rowe said. “We’ve gotten a lot of exposure and hopefully we can stay in the competition. It’s helped us a lot in writing applications and getting our business together.”
To find out more about the Cade Prize, visit CadeMuseum.org and keep an eye on the blog for more on the Cade Prize Sweet 16.
