Behavioral SensingBehavioral and Environmental Sensing and Intervention

Phase 1 is focused on refining and ultimately verifying BESI's basic sensing and notification functionality and validating BESI's environmental assessments in a controlled setting - namely the laboratory and homes of two healthy volunteers. This phase also serves to support further requirements gathering to refine BESI for community-based deployment. No interventions are delivered.

Phase 2 starts the deployment of the technology within a community context, with the goals of validating the system's ability to assess agitation and environmental events in-situ and developing the cyber-sociophysical system models based on the dyad-specific relationship between agitation and the environment. A hybrid remote ethnographic methodology will be used, combining remote BESI measurement and caregiver diaries and a time-series design for the administration of the assessment battery.

Phase 3 is the intervention phase and the full realization of BESI. The goal is to employ the validated assessment capabilities and the developed modeling techniques to enable real-time, dyad-specific caregiver notifications that empower a caregiver to intervene with the PWD and/or environment before agitation escalation. In addition to validation of the BESI's ability to provide such appropriate notifications, Phase 3 will also serve as a pilot study about the effect that these notifications have on caregiver empowerment (as measured by self-efficacy) and the frequency and severity of PWD agitation, thus providing proof-of-concept for BESI's potential to improve dyad outcomes and motivating a larger-scale followup study to establish proof-of-practice.

We will assess whether real-time notifications of potential agitation via a wearable wrist device improves caregiver self-efficacy.