Providing an easy-to-use, quick and cost-effective tool for dementia pre-screening

Elderly from underprivileged backgrounds have lower health literacy in general. Besides, they may have limited access to dementia screening and thus early intervention. The venture aims to provide an easy-to-use, quick and cost-effective tool for large-scale dementia pre-screening. Using this tool, the pre-screening will take only 1 to 2 minutes in which the elderly just need to draw two simple polygons via a mobile app. The pre-screening result will be instantly available to caregivers.

The venture targets to recruit and benefit 400 elderly from four partner elderly centres in public housing estates. An annual subscription fee will be charged to the participating elderly centres. The project team expects that this tool could save manpower of the elderly centres as compared to conventional screening methods. Instead of conducting screening, the elderly centres can reallocate their resources to focus more on the provision of follow-up cognitive training for elderly at-risk.

The project team has a strong academic and sector-specific background. The underlying methodology has been piloted and the technology has been filed for US and China patents.