Relay Podcast - Technology and Dementia PIA

Dementia Researcher Vodcast

06/29/26

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36m

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Welcome to the seventh season of the Dementia Researcher X ISTAART PIA Relay Podcast. Across six episodes, leading early career and senior researchers hand the mic from one ISTAART PIA to the next, giving you an honest, peer-to-peer tour of where dementia research is actually heading, from wearables and biomarkers to policy and trial design, in the run-up to AAIC.

Sleep might be one of the earliest windows we have into brain health, and Dr Vanessa Young thinks the way we measure it is about to change. Fresh from finishing her PhD in May, Vanessa is a postdoc at the Glenn Biggs Institute and Communications Chair of the Technology and Dementia PIA. She studies sleep and the ageing brain, where the relationship seems to run both ways: as dementia develops, sleep gets worse, and poor sleep may feed back into the disease. With host Dr Carla Abdelnour, she gets into digital biomarkers, why wearables let you capture sleep continuously at home rather than in a one-off sleep study, and the move from wearables to "nearables", bed sensors and room radar that ask nothing of the participant at all. They also cover the analysis headache that comes with years of continuous data, the equity problem when a study needs home Wi-Fi, and what the PIA has planned for its full-day AAIC preconference on AI.

Takeaways

Sleep and dementia feed each other, so sleep is worth studying as somewhere we might actually step in and help.
Wearables capture sleep night after night at home, which reaches people who live nowhere near a big sleep centre.
The field is shifting from wearables to "nearables", sensors in the mattress or radar in the room, to cut participant burden and bias.
Years of continuous data brings its own problem: telling meaningful signal apart from background noise.
If a study needs Wi-Fi to send its data, it quietly excludes people, so digital equity has to be designed in.

The Alzheimer’s Association International Society to Advance Alzheimer’s Research and Treatment (ISTAART) convenes the global Alzheimer’s and dementia science community. Members share knowledge, fuel collaboration and advance research to find more effective ways to detect, treat and prevent Alzheimer’s and other dementias. Professional Interest Areas (PIA) are an assembly of ISTAART members with common subspecialties or interests.

There are currently 30 PIAs covering a wide range of interests and fields, from Neuroimaging to Diversity and Disparities and everything in between.

Find out more at https://istaart.alz.org/

A transcript of this show, links and show notes and profile on all our guests are available on our website at https://www.dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk.

If you prefer to watch rather than listen, you will find a video version of this podcast on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and on our website.

Leave us a tip:

https://dementia-researcher.captivate.fm/support

Follow us on social media:

Download and Register with our Community App:

https://www.onelink.to/dementiaresearcher

We gratefully acknowledge the support of our funders: Alzheimer’s Association, Race Against Dementia, Alzheimer’s Research UK, Alzheimer’s Society, and the National Institute for Healt...

Previous Episode

Supporting Dementia at Home: Insights from PALLDEM

June 19

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64m

Most people with dementia live, and many die, at home. The person who knows them best in those final months is often not a clinician but a home care worker coming through the door several times a day, doing some of the hardest work in the dementia pathway with little training and almost no research behind them. This episode asks what good home care actually looks like, why it is so hard to deliver, and what one study is doing about it.

Host Dr Alice Carstairs is joined by the PALLDEM Homecare team from the Cicely Saunders Institute at King's College London: Dr Lesley Williamson, who co-leads the study; research assistant Annika Dhawan, who runs the engagement work; and Dr Clare Ellis-Smith, who developed the IPOS Dem outcome measure. They are joined by lived experience expert Alan Richardson, who cared for his mother for 15 years, and Tony O'Flaherty, director at Home Instead Wandsworth, Lambeth and Dulwich.

Together they cover what IPOS Dem is, why home care gets so little attention, what it really takes to get a tool used on the ground, and why recognition for this workforce is overdue.

Essential Links:

Famileo - https://bit.ly/FamileoDR26
PALLDEM-Homecare - https://bit.ly/4e6bdvd
IPOS-Dem - https://bit.ly/4vJgkaA

Key topics:

Role of home care workers in dementia support
Implementation of iPOSDEM in home care settings
Challenges and solutions in home care for dementia
Research and innovation in community dementia care

This episode is sponsored by Famileo. Helping families living with dementia stay close with a personalised printed magazine, delivered monthly. Over a quarter of a million families already use Famileo to stay connected. First month free with code DR26. https://bit.ly/FamileoDR26

A transcript of this show, links and show notes and profile on all our guests are available on our website at https://www.dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk.

If you prefer to watch rather than listen, you will find a video version of this podcast on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and on our website.

Leave us a tip:

https://dementia-researcher.captivate.fm/support

Follow us on social media:

Download and Register with our Community App:

https://www.onelink.to/dementiaresearcher

We gratefully acknowledge the support of our funders: Alzheimer’s Association, Race Against Dementia, Alzheimer’s Research UK, Alzheimer’s Society, and the National Institute for Health and Care Research.

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Next Episode

Relay Podcast - Health Policy PIA

June 30

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28m

If we cured Alzheimer's tomorrow but did no work on cost, distribution or access, we would have cured it only for the richest people in the world. That line from Lillian Morgado sits at the centre of this episode. Lillian is a research coordinator at Georgia State University and Communications Chair of the ISTAART Health Policy PIA, working mainly in qualitative research and legal epidemiology. With host Dr Vanessa Young, she talks through what qualitative work actually involves, her research on caregivers and people with dementia in the justice system, and the question that opened up next: what happens to someone with no caregiver to advocate for them. They get into why AI and blood-based biomarkers are as much policy problems as scientific ones, how regulation differs across borders, and why policy is the bridge that decides whether science reaches the people it was meant for. Lillian also runs through the Health Policy PIA's busy week at AAIC, from PIA Day to a featured research session on dementia care across countries.

Takeaways

Policy is the bridge from the lab to the patient; without it, a breakthrough only reaches the few who can already afford care.
Qualitative interviews and coding surface the right questions before the big quantitative money goes in.
Caregivers matter enormously when someone with dementia meets the justice system, which raises the question of those who have none.
AI and blood-based biomarkers carry legal and access questions, and the rules differ between, say, the US and Europe under GDPR.
You do not join a PIA because you already belong; you belong because you get involved, and you need not be an expert to contribute.

There are currently 30 PIAs covering a wide range of interests and fields, from Neuroimaging to Diversity and Disparities and everything in between.

Find out more at https://istaart.alz.org/

A transcript of this show, links and show notes and profile on all our guests are available on our website at https://www.dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk.

If you prefer to watch rather than listen, you will find a video version of this podcast on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and on our website.

Leave us a tip:

https://dementia-researcher.captivate.fm/support

Follow us on social media:

Download and Register with our Community App:

https://www.onelink.to/dementiaresearcher

We gratefully acknowledge the support of our fu...