A Novel, AI-Enabled Dementia Care Agent to Reduce Disparities for Rural ADRD Care Partners.

PROJECT SUMMARY Care partners of individuals with Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementia (ADRD) in rural areas experience higher caregiving burden and lower social support compared to urban caregivers. Although caregiver education and support delivered by home and community-based service (HCBS) providers has demonstrated the ability to reduce caregiver burden, those serving rural areas often face workforce shortages and capacity constraints, limiting their service availability and accessibility among rural care partners. Further, no scalable intervention currently exists to enable HCBS providers to deliver real-time education and support tailored to the evolving needs of rural ADRD care partners. To address these critical gaps, we plan to develop the AI-enabled Dementia Care Agent that will be available as a 24x7 service to support rural ADRD care partners. The Dementia Care Agent, which will be provided to care partners through HCBS providers, will utilize vetted ADRD caregiving education and support content from National Institute on Aging, AGEucate, and other authoritative sources. This specialized knowledge base will be added to a large language model (LLM), a machine learning system that can generate and understand complex human language interactions. We will integrate the Dementia Care Agent with CareVirtue’s proven caregiver support platform to provide tailored ADRD education and support while enhancing the ability of rural HCBS providers to increase capacity to provide ADRD education and support. Our goal is to provide a personalized, context-aware Dementia Care Agent that is accessible to rural ADRD care partners for real-time support needs and alleviate the ADRD education and support capacity limitations faced by many HCBS providers. Our multi-disciplinary team includes experts in machine learning, AI agents, LLM technology, software commercialization, ADRD caregiving support, and HCBS providers serving rural ADRD care partners. Our long- term objective is to commercialize the Dementia Care Agent intervention to provide real-time support to rural ADRD care partners, increase the availability and accessibility of ADRD education, improve capacity for HCBS providers, and reduce the disproportionate burden that rural ADRD care partners face by overcoming barriers to availability and accessibility for needed ADRD education, training, and support.