Charity Overview
Alzheimer's Research UK is working to revolutionise the way dementia is treated, diagnosed, and prevented. And one day, cured. As the UK’s leading dementia research charity, they are dedicated to ending the heartbreak of dementia. To speed up progress towards a cure, they are funding the best research, collaborating with the most forward-thinking scientists, and joining forces with world-class organisations.
Project Summary
The diseases in the brain that cause dementia can start up to 20 years before a person develops symptoms. Between 2020 – 2022, ICAP Charity Day helped fund Alzheimer's Research UK’s Early Detection of Neurodegenerative diseases (EDoN) initiative. The programme, established in 2018, aimed to investigate innovative ways to detect dementia-causing diseases early, using digital technology and machine learning to look for their very earliest signs.
The EDoN programme is testing multiple technologies for their potential to detect dementia early. The EDoN toolkit consists of a headband sleep monitor, a Fitbit activity tracker, and two smartphone apps.
Generous donations from TP ICAP have funded critical elements of the EDoN initiative from the very start. The funding helped establish the programme’s Digital Hub – allowing researchers to identify digital markers for early detection of neurodegenerative disease, design the EDoN toolkit for the Pilot study and set up a digital platform to centralise data from over 350 volunteers trialling the technology, across four international cohorts. The collected digital data will be curated to form a harmonised dataset that will be made available to the wider research community.
More recently, investment from TP ICAP has funded a PhD studentship assessing the usability and acceptability of the EDoN toolkit. This funding enabled two small studies, involving people with mild cognitive impairment, their carers and healthcare professionals, who each gave valuable insights into how well the EDoN digital toolkit might work to detect early signs of dementia. The studies identified advantages and potential barriers of the EDoN toolkit, which were shared at UK and international conferences in 2022.
Global efforts to further develop accessible early detection tools will be possible thanks, in part, to EDoN’s open-engagement approach. Crucially, the need for cross-sector collaborations is ever increasing across the dementia research field, and insights from the EDoN initiative will strengthen these efforts as Alzheimer’s Research UK continues its work towards a cure.
See more of Our Impact
