EXCLUSIVE: New £4m prize launched to develop innovations that help people living with dementia
Alzheimer’s Society, Innovate UK and the Medical Research Council (MRC) have this week launched a new £4.1m prize to develop life-changing technology for people living with dementia.
The Longitude Prize on Dementia, which was announced earlier this year, will be delivered by innovation challenge prize experts, Challenge Works, and aims to seek personalised assistive technologies to help slow the disease’s progression. Innovators will be challenged to develop technologies that learn about the lives of people with early-stage dementia, employing novel and emerging technologies to bridge cognitive gaps that develop as their condition progresses.
In addition, wider support has been funded to provide innovators with crucial insight and expertise, facilitating whatever they need to bring their ideas to life – like access to data, collaborations with people living with dementia and dementia organisations in the UK and around the world, advice on product design, user experience and business mentoring.
Colin Capper, Associate Director of Evidence and Participation at Alzheimer’s Society, explains to THIIS more about the prize and how independent living professionals can get involved.
By Colin Capper
Assistive technology, dementia and independent living: how AI could transform the lives of millions
We live in a digitally dominated world. In healthcare we see on a daily basis that lives are being improved and saved thanks to rapidly evolving technology – be it the rise of home diagnostics, to technologies that enable proactive self-care.
As progress marches swiftly on, it’s apparent that there are areas in healthcare where there are growing gaps when it comes to technological innovation and making lives better. Dementia – a condition that devastates lives by causing people to lose not just their memories, but relationships and identity, and ultimately independence too – is one of those areas. Staggeringly, 900,000 people currently live with dementia in the UK, and 209,600 will develop dementia this year, that’s one person every three minutes.
When it comes to dementia care, there is existing technology, but on the whole it is designed for carers to monitor people, rather than for the person with dementia themselves. These ‘technology-enabled care’ products include GPS tracking devices and home sensors. They are indeed valuable tools, but their primary purpose isn’t to help people living with dementia live joyfully.
Instead, the technology risks people living with dementia becoming passengers in their own journey. We believe that this absence of technology that helps people live a happy and independent life is a missing piece of the puzzle in dementia care and must be addressed.
This is why Alzheimer’s Society, alongside Innovate UK, has launched the Longitude Prize on Dementia. Working with innovation experts, Challenge Works, it is a multi-million-pound prize to incentivise the best and brightest innovators around the world to develop new technologies that help with the memory and thinking problems that develop as dementia progresses.
This could be smart assistants to help with communication, or intuitive tools to support someone to plan their day or week ahead. They could help people navigate complex social situations or make it easier to manage their household.
It calls on diverse expertise in artificial intelligence, machine learning, adult social care, independent living and assistive technology, to come together, along with the crucial involvement of people affected by dementia, to develop a new generation of tools and solutions that will bring continued joy and purpose to people living with dementia by helping them remain independent for as long as possible.
This is a significant issue that needs serious investment. The Longitude Prize on Dementia will award a total of £4.1 million. This includes £3.1 million in seed funding and grants to the most promising innovators – with 20 semi-finalists receiving £80,000 Discovery Awards early next year to help them research and develop their ideas, then five finalists will receive £300,000 development grants in August 2024 to create workable products. Finally, one overall winner will be awarded £1 million in 2026.
As well as funding from Alzheimer’s Society and Innovate UK, the prize has been made possible thanks to generous donations from Caretech, the Hunter Foundation and Heather Corrie. With Caretech’s expertise in supporting individuals with special and complex needs, the Hunter Foundation’s mission to invest in innovation for great challenges, and Challenge Works’ record of delivering high impact prizes, innovators taking part will have access to a broad network of capacity-building expertise and support to help bring game-changing ideas to life.
The beauty of challenge prizes is that they level the playing field for innovators, rewarding ideas over name-recognition. Through an open competition they offer seed funding and expert capacity building support to advance multiple solutions to the same problem.
Through the prize, we can change the narrative for dementia-related technology, and find that missing piece of the puzzle by helping people who receive a dementia diagnosis live independently and joyfully at home for as long as possible.
To find out more about the Longitude Prize on Dementia and enter your idea, visit dementia.longitudeprize.org
