With the increasing age of our population, neurodegenerative diseases are rapidly becoming one of our most burning issues to address. This article provides a general idea of neurodegeneration and proposes an App prototype that supports the communications between patients and doctors.
Neurodegeneration, what about it?
Neurodegeneration, as it says in the word, means the damage, death, and inactivation of the nervous system, most importantly, the neurons. This could be caused externally, for example, in a car accident where you might be concussed, some damage will be made in your brain that may result in the death of some neurons storing short-term memory, which is why as first-aiders, we would ask you some questions, such as ‘what day is it today?’ or ‘what were you doing before the car crash?’ to ensure that your memory is still intact and that you didn’t sustain any head and neck injuries.
However, currently, a lot of our human resources are spent targeting the internal side of neurodegeneration, something that’s happening every day, yet at a much more significant rate when you get older. The prevention or reduction of this effect will promote human longevity and improve the quality of life towards your last sprint in the marathon of life.
The biggest effect of neurodegenerative diseases is their impact on accelerating the loss of quality of life, and unfortunately, they are prevalent in our population. To name a few: Alzheimer’s Disease, Parkinson’s disease, and Ataxia. This project, ALZ, was inspired by my friend at Toastmasters, who is in his 60s and have been gripped by the hands of Alzheimer’s disease. Even though troubled by the induced symptoms, he remained an excellent speaker and was recently elected as the president of our club with me stepping into his old role as Vice President Education. Our encounter marked the beginning of my public speaking journey, and now I would like to extend it further and make this the beginning of my lifelong journey in innovation.
Back to neurodegeneration, I would like to walk you through my 14-day experience with researching and developing ALZ.
ALZ on the ground (Prototyping)
The ALZ project’s main objective is to develop a multi-purpose App that has different interfaces designed to suit both neurodegenerative patients and their carers. It’s created within the gap in communication between patients, caregivers, and doctors. It targets the weakness in disease monitoring and progress recognition of all neurodegenerative diseases, especially patients with Alzheimer’s disease, who becomes extremely vulnerable towards the end of their lives. We, as people caring for them, bear not only the physical pressure of looking after them, but also the stress, anxiety, and depression that comes as their situation escalates in front of us. We ask ourselves every day, ‘did they remember to take their meds?’, ‘did they miss their doctor’s check-ups this week?’, ‘are they safe to look after themselves today?’, and most importantly, ‘how are they feeling now?’. 40–70% of caretakers showed symptoms of depression, and if we cannot physically relieve their work, we can take off some of that anxiousness from them worrying about their people today.
The ALZ project APP is delivered to three groups of people. Firstly, let’s look at the patient’s interface.
One of the major symptoms of Alzheimer’s Disease is dementia, a loss in cognitive functioning, that includes thinking, reasoning, and remembering. I approached this with a slightly less scientific and academic-heavy method, but instead just from a feeling and emotional perspective. I didn’t address them as patients, but instead as users, to make them feel comfortable, and well looked after by our APP, if they don’t remember any other things that day, at least they would know that they are an active member using this APP, and not a person being monitored through this process. As the user, they will be tested with a quick and simple memory test the first time they log on every day.
Users will be shown the pictures associated with the words and at different positions to simultaneous test their ability to associate, memory, and spatial recognition. Next, following the exact format of the cognition test they would take at their doctors, they will be asked to perform a completely unrelated task, in this case, drawing a clock, and then brought back to recall the three words that were given before this task. Once they are done with this, they may proceed to the home screen. Now, this is only a quick 2–3 minute task for our users, but it is an excellent way for doctors and carers to effectively monitor their mental status each day, and may even serve as an excellent research data collection tool by monitoring the time they spent working on remembering those items and the trends that might display. One of the major problems associated with brain-ageing research is the timeframe it takes for symptoms to develop and diseases to kick in. No research institute can follow up with a patient for a significantly long time frame of up to 30 or 40 years with this closeness, which is why depending on their research project, ALZ will implement different tasks for the users to use and hence will be able to collect millions of data points for open access to every researcher around the world to develop their cool innovations. This successfully resolves the information scarcity crises of age-related research.
Now we see the real interface, pretty simple, right? Bingo! As a patient, they may be more or less agitated by their symptoms and the fact that they just couldn’t recall those items. We would like them to feel happy and safe in this space here. And because it is an age-related disease, the easier the interface, the easier it is for them to learn and access. These boxes effectively solve the questions carers stressed about earlier in a clean, collective manner. ‘Did they remember to take their meds?’ yes they did, we reminded them and made sure they checked it off. ‘Did they miss their doctor’s check-up this week’, is highly unlikely, because we set reminders both within the App and as a push notification on their phone as well. ‘Are they safe to look after themselves today?’ Yes, any medication that may run out has been sent to them and both patients, carers, and doctors will be sent reminders to make sure those medications are reassessed, prescribed and topped up from the get-go. And most importantly, the last question, ‘how are they feeling today?’, they will tell you that through the App, as we know that most elderly patients are not as comfortable sharing their weaknesses with their close family members, we provided a platform for them to do so with both shortcuts and a diary to make a start for them, and to make it easier for families to connect against the symptoms of the diseases.
Now, what do you get as their caretaker? The interface gets much more comprehensive, allowing you to navigate their performance, check off the reminders, and understand their medication. Because of the short session time each patient gets with their doctors, a lot of the understanding of their disease depends on personal research, and it is very stressful if they start googling and going down the rabbit hole. Here, we have the pie chart to give them the transparency of their medication and will provide resources and info sheets on each medication closely for family members or patients themselves to read and understand.
Additionally, as their doctor, you would get a similar interface as the caretaker, but also on top of that, a space for you to make your own notes and set medication schedules. This makes it easier to quickly manage a patient’s overall medication and supports early recognition of symptomatic development when a patient shows a drastic downward trend in performance. They’ll be able to schedule a proper appointment straight away.
A quick summary before we move on…
The entire design process on Figma took me around 2 days, and the most challenging part was actually getting the buttons to work together without glitching out!
Stay tuned for the ALZ Project Part II — where I will elaborate on the treatment options for neurodegeneration and discuss the most daring ideas of tracking neurodegeneration at an early stage. (Spoiler: The final video product of my 14-day journey will also be in there!)
