PHOTOZIG INC — Department of Health and Human Services SBIR Phase I: NIA

Description

Project Summary Alzheimer s Disease AD is a devastating illness for patients families and society Most of the care of AD patients rests on shoulders of informal caregivers largely untrained to undertake the caregiving role bearing a high level of distress and suffering deterioration in physical health and psychological well being There are over million Americans providing care to dementia patients experiencing high rates of stress depression associated risks for cardiovascular diseases and many other adverse health effects For example in separate studies hospitalization and emergency department visits were more likely for dementia caregivers than any other types of caregivers Research suggests that non pharmacological interventions are beneficial to dementia caregivers However many programs depend on facility based approaches or small group interventions which limit feasibility cost effectiveness and deployment The lack of dissemination is due to cost location i e outside settings group meetings etc or temporal factors specific meeting times In order to address these limitations we propose the development of a new Mindfulness based Cognitive Coping MCC Mobile App intervention not only to enable access to caregivers with the mobile app at any place and any time but also to provide an effective intervention to reduce stress and depression in a cost effective manner to a large number of caregivers The MCC intervention will be adapted from the Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy MBCT which has been effective to treat individuals with major depressive disorder with the integration of dementia caregiving coping strategies from our past studies to help caregivers to overcome stressful situations in their caregiver role Our goal is to enhance the very effective MBCT protocol with core dementia caregiving components and implement it in a mobile app called Caring Mind App CMA with interactive and engaging features in order to develop an intervention to decrease stress reduce depression and improve the psychological well being of dementia caregivers which could be disseminated to millions of families struggling with dementia Innovation this is the first implementation of the MBCT protocol combined with dementia caregiving coping strategies in a mobile app As far as we know there are no similar products in the market place In partnership with the Alzheimer s Association Stanford University and caregivers we will determine the curriculum of the new intervention Focus groups involving caregivers will inform the project and explore caregiver attitudes towards the MCC program mobile app usage and overall intervention protocol A prototype will be developed and tested with dementia caregivers to establish the feasibility of the approach in Phase I The results will guide the development of the full intervention in Phase II Commercial Opportunity MCC program will be available to dementia caregivers Million people in US as a mobile app subscription This model has been very successful with our current mobile apps in App Stores Public Health Relevance Alzheimer s disease affect over million family dementia caregivers in US the hidden patients of Alzheimer s disease resulting in deterioration of their physical health and psychological well being with high levels of stress and depression This project aims to develop a new intervention for reducing caregiver distress and burden of care enabling a more effective and less stressful caregiving process which could be deployed to millions of dementia caregivers by the proposed mobile app throughout the app stores After Phase II completion the expected outcomes are the following improve the overall quality of life of caregivers enhance coping skills decrease stress and reduce depression in addition the following indirect benefits are expected not measured by this study delay patient institutionalization decrease caregiver medication related to stress depression and thereby reduce societal costs