Project Summary/Abstract
It is highly beneficial and meaningful for individuals with Alzheimer’s disease (IAD) to age-in-place.
Prolonging time at home helps preserve their memories, spatial awareness and socio-emotional
connections. At the same time, undue care burden is imposed and is associated with high rates of
depression and anxiety among family caregivers. While relocation to long term care is an option, the
alarming increase in annual costs with assisted living and nursing home admission creates significant
financial constraints on the families. There is a significant need for novel technological solutions to promote
independence, health, and safety of IAD to age-in-place. To address this need, we propose to develop a
smart home-based social assistive robot (SAR) called Mobile Assistive Robot with Smart Sensing
(MARSS). Our innovative SAR will: a) have four evidence-supported modalities of care built in- activity
engagement and assistance, telehealth, home safety, and caregiver-care recipient connectivity; and b) a
training program to enable a non-technology expert (caregiver, family member or health professional) to
scale and program the modalities to fit with the disease severity and context of the IAD.
MARSS will be developed and tested in accordance to the NIH Stage Model of Intervention Development.
We have already pilot-tested a lab-based model of MARSS (Stage Ia). Now our priority is to pilot test the
technology in the community (with 8 dyads of IAD and caregivers) and verify its implementation fidelity,
robustness as well as behavior change techniques to optimize target engagement of IADs and caregivers
(Aim I- Stage IB). To address Aim II (Stage III), we will conduct an 18-month randomized controlled trial to
validate the real-world efficacy of MARSS. We will recruit 60 dyads in two staggered cohorts of IAD and
caregivers and randomly assign them to the intervention (n=30) or a control group (n=30). We will gather
repeated measures data on the IAD’s functional independence, safety, and physical and cognitive health,
and the caregiver’s perceived care burden, autonomy and wellbeing over nine data points, 2 months apart.
To account mechanism-focused change, we will objectively collect data on the technology’s utilization to
tease out the influence of the MARSS’s modalities on the intervention outcomes. In addition to much
needed empirical evidence on AD-based SARs, the findings will contribute knowledge to create and test
advanced yet pragmatic technological solutions to strengthen aging-in-place of IAD.
