Alzheimer´s Disease rehabilitation using smartphones to improve patients´ quality of life

Alzheimer´s Disease (AD) is an incurable disease that causes dementia. Rehabilitation efforts of this disease focus on slowing down the rate of progression and improving the quality of life of the patients by enhancing their ability to engage with the environment and society surrounding them. In this paper, we present an integrated application (ADcope) that utilizes mobility and advanced communication features of smartphones to rehabilitate AD patients. ADcope integrates quality of life enhancing modules such as the memory wallet, calendaring, and NFC enclosure content tagging, and dementia exercising modules that incorporate audio assisted memory training and spaced retrieval exercises. Initial trials of the ADcope application with AD patients confirm that the benefits of previously proposed AD tools and exercises can also be achieved using a smartphone application. The simplicity of using the ADcope application can increase the rate of adoption of AD tools in dealing with AD patients.