Healthy Aging: an EEG-based wearable device to accurately monitor sleep and enhance quality for improved cognitive functioning

PROJECT SUMMARY More than 40% of individuals as young as 60 start to experience some sort of cognitive decline. Among these, nearly one person in five develops mild cognitive impairment (MCI), a potential precursor of severe neurodegenerative diseases, like Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) and dementia. Today, AD and dementia represent an economic burden of $277 B/year in the U.S. alone. Nothing can be done to cure or slow down them and drug development has failed so far - big pharma companies are quitting research in this field. Notwithstanding, life expectancy is rising. By 2050 the number of dementia cases will triple, and 13.2 million Americans will live with AD. Therefore, finding alternative interventions to slow down cognitive decline is an urgent priority and a necessary answer to an unmet need. Age-related decline in memory performance has been linked to the age-related reduction of deep sleep, or Slow Wave sleep (SWS). Interestingly, this represents a modifiable risk factor for cognitive decline. We previously demonstrated the ability to enhance declarative memory in older adults by manipulating SWS for one night, in a laboratory environment, through non-invasive acoustic stimulation. The key is in the timing of acoustic stimulation, which is based on real-time analysis of EEG signal and aims at amplifying the single slow wave. However, it must be verified whether this acoustic stimulation can be comfortably tolerated when administered for many consecutive nights and whether memory enhancement shows a cumulative effect. To this extent, with this SBIR phase I project, we plan to bring our technology from the laboratory environment to the home-base settings. In particular, we aim to 1) Realize and validate a wearable headband, suitable for at-home-use, capable to detect the SWS upstate from EEG signal in real-time, and to deliver, accordingly, an acoustic stimulation. 2) Test user experience of the new device in healthy and MCI adults aged 60 and older. 3) Examine cumulative memory enhancement in these subjects upon delivery of acoustic stimulation for 7 consecutive nights. The successful outcomes of this project will open the way to the realization of the first wearable for cognitive training, based on safe manipulation of sleep via EEG-controlled acoustic stimulation. By improving memory performance during sleep, the proposed approach has the potential to dramatically delay or prevent the onset of age-related cognitive decline. In the long run, the benefit of our system may be further extended to slowing down progression of neurodegenerative disorders such AD and dementia.PROJECT NARRATIVE Cognitive decline is one of the most costly aspects of aging, in terms of financial, personal and societal impact, and a potential precursor of dementia and neurodegenerative diseases. To date, no effective treatment is available to slow down the progression of such conditions. We propose the first wearable for cognitive training based on improvement of sleep quality that will reduce the societal burden in elderly care, and in the long term may represent an effective treatment for neurodegenerative diseases.