Radio Me: Real-time Radio Remixing for people with mild to moderate dementia who live alone, incorporating Agitation Reduction, and Reminders

The Radio Me project will deliver an aid for people with mild to moderate dementia (henceforth referred to as PWD) living alone in their homes, to provide memory reminders and agitation reduction.

Radio listening is most common in the age range of PWD, and mainstream radio has two parts: played music, and spoken voice by DJs. Thus, it provides an interface involving voice and music, and one that is familiar to PWD. Radio Me (RM) is a system that maps these natural voice and music elements onto integrated aids for memory and agitation. RM will enable broadcast-style radio as a mode of human-computer interaction to support PWD who live alone in their own homes. The title Radio Me refers to the system rather than the audio resulting from the real-time generative remixing.

An example of functionality is envisaged as follows: RM audio output through the speakers will, by default, sound like the live local radio. So, when the PWD switches on the radio in the morning, it initially sounds like their local station. However, at some pre-decided point (as entered into an electronic diary by PWD or their carer), and at the start of a song, a DJ-like voice seamlessly overrides the real DJ and reminds the listener to hydrate. A little later, the radio reminds the listener to eat lunch. Soon RM detects that the listener is becoming agitated (via a worn wrist-sensor). It overrides the next DJ song choice and selects a song from the user's personal library, which is known is likely to calm them. It can keep playing calming material until it detects the user has calmed. RM can give more frequent date / time checks for the listener than a normal radio station, and remind them to take their medication, to attend a Memory Café, etc.

The project is timely because: (1) it addresses dementia, one of the UK's major national health and care priorities; (2) it addresses the UK's care profession crisis.

This research will lead to a prototype that will help people with dementia (PWD) who will benefit through increased quality of life by encouraging and supporting and prompting them to perform vital daily tasks more autonomously for longer, as well as reducing instances of agitation. This increased quality of life and autonomy for PWD will also benefit their carers, who might otherwise have had to perform some of these tasks, alleviating some of the burden from them.

The resulting prototype will enable PWD to live as long as possible in their own homes - a pressing issue - to optimise public spending and to support their quality of life. The taxpayer will benefit because the cost to health and social care of agitation in Alzheimer's disease alone is £2 billion a year in the UK, making up 12% of the total cost of Alzheimer's disease care alone. NHS admissions due to agitation events can be reduced, as can the burden of NHS home care. Similarly for other visiting service providers. It can release care staff to attend those who need more personalised care.

Post-project, a medical grant proposal will be put in with Brighton and Sussex Medical School, to implement the prototype in a broad and sustainable way.

The following items address impact during and within the shorter term (see Pathways to Impact for details): our partner MHA Homes are already using Music Therapy and this project provides opportunities for Sussex NHS Trust to seek where it can improve its services using anti-agitation music or music therapy.

Broadcasters aim to increase the personalisation of their content: both the BBC and Bauer Media are keen to learn from our research. They also have databases of audio which an automated algorithm that can distinguish between audio types would be useful for cataloguing. Automated DJing would also be useful to broadcasters in balancing costs.

Those who find complex technology hard to use, for example the elderly, will be impacted by our diary HCI research. This research will be provided on GitHub thus allowing any technical team to implement it for others.

This project will contribute to two areas of timely commercial musical interest: accessing musical databases in response to indicators of bio-state, and the wellbeing applications of music. Anti-agitation and calming music can be beneficial to a broad section of the population, or to those who have physically-related conditions such as anxiety. This area is not dependent on people having access to Radio Me, as our project also includes the selection of, and manual playing of, anti-agitation music.

Music Therapists will benefit from new procedures developed during the project to help them work with PWD to select anti-agitation music for those people. They will also benefit from an insight into how bio-bracelets can be used constructively in more traditional music therapy work.

The BBC and other broadcasters are looking to personalize content but have not utilized such personalization to improve accessibility for people with neurodegenerative or mental health problems. Broadcasters want to increase their accessibility and this project will provide them with insight (from our surveys distributed early in the project to PWD) as to how they can help more. Broadcasters have mentioned how they would like to use the standardized RDS "Radio Data System" (e.g. traffic news beeps) to provide more accessibility. This project will provide some practical tested examples of how it could be utilized better.

Part of the Alzheimer's Society research strategy is to be at the forefront of involving PWD in the co-design and co-delivery of research. The first work stream of this project develops procedures for doing this with care providers and the NHS in a multi-disciplinary hi-tech project, which are then utilized and demonstrated through the rest of the work streams and will be usable by the Alzheimer's Society and other charities for their future research.