WASHINGTON, June 19, 2007
Studying Alzheimer's With Motion Sensors
Project Tracks Movement Of Elderly In Their Homes, Looking For Signs Of Slowing Brain Activity
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Elaine Bloomquist points to a motion sensor in the bathroom of her home in Milwaukie, Ore., on June 18, 2007. Tiny motion sensors are attached to the walls, doorways, and even the refrigerator of Bloomquist's home, tracking the seemingly healthy 86-year-old's daily activity. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)
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Interactive Losing Memories Facts about Alzheimer's, help for caregivers and a look at sufferers who've put the disease in the spotlight.
Bloomquist knows the conundrum all too well. She volunteered for Kaye's research because her husband died of Alzheimer's, as did his parents and her own mother.
"It's hard to know when people begin Alzheimer's," she reflects. "Alzheimer people do very well socially for short periods of time. If it's just a casual conversation, they rise to the occasion."
Measuring how people fare at home — on bad days as well as good ones, not just when they are doing their best for the doctor — may spot changes that signal someone's at high risk long before they're actually demented, Kaye told the Alzheimer's Association's international dementia-prevention meeting last week.
"If you only assess them every once-in-a-blue-moon, you really are at a loss to know what they are like on a typical day," Kaye explains.
High-tech monitors under study:
Why? The theory is that as Alzheimer's begins destroying brain cells, signals to nerves may become inconsistent — like static on a radio — well before memories become irretrievable. One day, signals to walk fire fine. The next, those signals are fuzzy and people hesitate, creating wildly varying activity patterns.
The pilot study prompted a first-of-its-kind grant from the National Institutes of Health to extend the monitoring study to 300 homes; 112 are being monitored already, mostly in retirement communities like Bloomquist's. They are given weekly health questionnaires to make sure an injury or other illness that affects activity does not skew the results.
In addition, participants receive computer training so they can play brain-targeted computer games and take online memory and cognition tests. The keyboards are rigged to let researchers track changes in typing speed and Internet use that could indicate confusion.
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- If they're going to do a study that is really worthwhile, they should start when a person is in their 50's. I am not a scientist but I have always believed that Alzheimer's disease does not come to a person all of a sudden when they are in their 70's or 80's. I believe that it really starts when a person is still "young" (40's, 50's)and it slowly progresses as the person gets older. I also believe that the lack of connection between brain nerve cells (the electrical link between cells--that which allows for the transference of information from one cell to the next) occurs so gradually that it goes unnoticed until much later in life--when the degeneration has set in. If they could study the liquid that surrounds these cells and find the why the connectivity diminishes, then they might find a way to reverse the process. I trully believe that it has to do with a person's way of thinking and personal habits (what he eats, how he sleeps, how he reacts to different stimuli, etc). Start the study early and keep with the same subject/s for at least 2 decades and you may get somewhere.
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