Cognitive Rehabilitation based Personalized Solution for Dementia Patients using Reinforcement Learning

Abstract

Dementia is one of the most challenging health problems faced globally with the increase in the ageing population. The estimated current prevalence of dementia is 47.5 million worldwide. This number will nearly double in every 20 years globally. Dementia is basically, a syndrome which cannot be cured by medicine, but non-pharmacological therapy can be used to treat Dementia patients, this is known as Cognitive Rehabilitation Therapy. According to the recommendations of the doctors, the use of a brain training application could be better than traditional approaches. There are number of Brain training mobile applications in the world that could be useful in improving human concentration, attention and all sorts of brain activities but there isn’t any customized software solution that has games or activities. Patients can be in different stages of Dementia. Therefore, for a better cognitive rehabilitation they need personalized therapies with the games and activities. Accordingly, developing this application is an actual global requirement for dementia patients. The world is evolving with new technologies and this application includes the mind games based on such technologies as Reinforcement Learning which predict the next level for patients based on user behavior. And there are some activities on speech recognition using Deep Neural Network as well. Patients, caregivers and doctors can view the progress reports of the patients. All the games have designed along with the supervision and recommendation from a Consultant Psychiatrist in Sri Lanka. The main objective is to help the Dementia patients in cognitive rehabilitation to improve the quality of life with best suited personalized games and activities.